On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 12:05:33 +0000, "Thomas Dalton" thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
So, we're all agreed that it's broken and needs fixing. That's an excellent first step! :-) How do we want to do the second step?
Jimbo already answered that. We discuss every change really thoroughly and ensure that all changes have broad consensus and are impeccably sourced and neutral. As long as we do that, there should be no pressing problem.
But...
We still have the odd cases like Gregory Lauder-Frost where the office action was the result of his legal advisors stating that we could not mention his conviction for fraud because of the UK's Rehabilitation of Offenders Act. That demands actual legal advice. As it happens, the Act only prevents "spent" convictions being mentioned in a defamatory way, there is no apparent restriction on coverage in a neutral, independent biography, and his friends did not help his case by initially including the case but claiming that he had been cleared on appeal - it was possible (though certainly not trivial) to verify that this was simply not true, and it was only when we included the citations to back up the conviction and failed appeal that they pulled the office stunt.
In these cases it is good to have feedback, even if the feedback is a weekly "sorry, no progress yet". And it would be good to know if there is a particular issue which needs to be addressed.
In other cases, the one which prompted this thread being Pacific Western university, there is no question of verifiable facts for which there might be a legal basis for forbidding inclusion. It's all about tone, sourcing and above all scrupulous fairness. So we can verify that PWU cooperated in an investigation into diploma mills, we can verify that it was discussed in the same breath, but we cannot say that the GAO director actually called it a diploma mill, because he did not, not in so many words. So as long as we set the bar high for sourcing, and ensure that we attribute every statement which might be perceived as questionable, I think we can proceed with improving the article.
Guy (JzG)