On 1/1/09, David Goodman dgoodmanny@gmail.com wrote:
much more complicated one that most Wikipedians do not understand and which is much more likely to be confusing.
You can help Wikipedia by explaining it to other Wikipedians (unless of course you're speaking for yourself).
to try the complicated one first is playing technical games with the encyclopedia.
Oh, the one that lets you edit after 4 days, 10 edits, and 0 [[brownie points]].
I forgot who it was that recently drew an absurd parallel between BLP issues and handgun fatalities, something to the effect of leaving articles unprotected being comparable to "giving a child a loaded gun".
Maybe so but an adult (or an "autoconfirmed" account) who has no experience handling a loaded gun before (or driving a car, or whatever you want to compare it to) isn't going to handle it much more safely than a child. Sure they've "seen more of the world" but have no experience specific to a potentially dangerous task.
On the other hand we could argue all day about the difference between a waiting period for you at the pawn shop counter and a waiting period for the bullet after it takes flight.
Personally I think it's a very important one!
—C.W.