On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 12:05:33 +0000, "Thomas Dalton"
<thomas.dalton(a)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)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG