On 4/15/07 11:25 AM, "Jeff Raymond" jeff.raymond@internationalhouseofbacon.com wrote:
Common decency is an entirely fluid concept from person to person, though. You adn I don't disagree with the intent in this case, but some find it harmful on a utilitarian scale.
"Some find it harmful" - did you lift that straight out of [[Wikipedia: Avoid weasel words]]? "Some" might "find it harmful" that we require reliable sourcing for anything at all, but we ignore them because we're an encyclopedia, not a blog.
As an encyclopedia that is one of the Internet's top-10 Web sites, we can no longer ignore the fact that what we write in the encyclopedia can have a real-world impact - by republicizing old, completely non-notable and discredited allegations, by bringing out and permanently recording ancient family squabbles for all to see, by having biographies which are nothing but thinly-veiled attack pages and by repeatedly being the vehicle for disgusting libels which can end up being published by us for months without being discovered.
Jeff, I can't help but think that if you were a member of the OTRS team and had to deal with the same things we have to read with on a day-to-day basis, your attitude would change overnight. We, as an editing community, still do a very poor job making sure that Wikipedia isn't a libel-and-attack vector. Human decency is one of the things that requires we change that.
-Travis Mason-Bushman