On 11/30/05, Snowspinner Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
The objection that Seigenthaler is having to Wikipedia is not even to the process or to the speed at which we fix vandalism. It is not to our current quality, it is not to anything fixable.
The fundamental objection that Seigenthaler has is that we allow people to post freely. His objection is to the belief that we ought not carefully monitor our users and that we ought avoid turning them in to the legal authorities in a dispute. His assumption that the article was posted by a vandal is dodgy at best - I would be shocked if he were not the subject of some conspiracy theory or another, and if whoever posted the article were anything more than a particularly stupid POV pusher. If Wikipedia were to in any way assist with turning a mere stupid POV pusher in to legal authorities, I know my support for the site would drop off swiftly.
That's exactly the problem with his article; I was wondering if someone had posted this already. He's not objecting primarily to the bad info (which could be deleted as soon as he noticed it, at the very least), but to the fact that he couldn't find out who posted it.
This is a problem with the internet in general. If it was posted on a geocities site he'd have *exactly the same problem* except that it'd actually take him *much longer* and probably be *much harder* to remove the incorrect information.
The only reason he thinks we should have different standards in this respect than geocities is because we are a "big deal," I imagine. Which is the "peaked too early" problem, but also might just be a phantom in the end -- I suspect Wikipedia does, or will, occupy a unique position between don't-even-trust-it (geocities) and oh-yeah-it's-almost-entirely-reliable (EB). Which isn't so bad. I don't see any other way around it, though I know Jimbo would rather we aspire for the latter category (but hey, I'm willing to try!).
FF