Has anyone done a sample of how many blps are actually vandalized at any given time? As I understand it, we do have bots that look for negative phrases such as the ones that occurred here--and such vandalism was removed many times. What did not get noticed was the pattern of repeats, and that is the fault of using bots and routine patrol without visual check of the history. There was sufficient vandalism to have justified semi protection 10 days ago.
As I look at BLPs, I see a great many more than are uncritically positive--and that seems to stay a very long time without being fixed. We could do a scan for key phrases there also, or characteristics like referring to the subject by his first name alone, as is the current style in public relations. If these don't get spotted when the article is new, the can last for years.
The very last thing we need is an attitude that will inhibit the use of fair information. And don't think it's only BLPs in the narrow sense. I've seen frequent attempts to removed sourced highly relevant negative information from articles about various institutions.
On 4/29/08, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:49 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
This seems like an overemphasis that somehow we (the policy-abiding
editors)
are the cause instead of the vandals being the cause. The primary cause
of
the vandalism rests with the vandals. Our policies address this case spot-on, but nobody fixed the article. Why didn't they? Maybe we need
more
editors. Maybe we need an automatic "bad-word robot" to collect examples
and create
a "bad word page". That would make it a lot easier to monitor. But
this
case is not a result of our policies, our policies say "don't do this".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine
The vandals will vandal. The libers will libel. The haters will hate. The POV pushers will push. They are a small but real and unavoidable facet of reality. A healthy Wikipedia would recognize it and mitigate it. The existing mitigation on English Wikipedia is rather limited and highly dependent on chance. ... basically a set of rules that say "don't do this", but very little in the way of organized enforcement.
The English Wikipedia community is aware, or at least ought to be aware, that these things happen routinely and t the community has one of the most potent positions from which to make improvements. As such it's the responsibility of the English Wikipedia community to try.
The argument that the vandals are ultimately responsible isn't productive since none of us has the power to change the nature of man. We do have the power to change the operation of English Wikipedia.
If you think that some of the proposed improvements are too sweeping and dramatic, then perhaps you should be working on making sure some alternatives happen... since covering our ears and holding the status quo simply can't last forever.
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