2008/4/29 Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com:
It is not a straw man. It is routine.
Not that common. Not like this. Requires a large group without many wikipedians in to get pissed off at someone.
And it hurts real people.
I doubt it. Mr Kinnear is already dislike by the majority of those who know about him I doubt the article had much of an impact one way or another.
To you, it is one of 2 million articles. To the victim, it is a top google hit on his own name.
To a city it is an easy way to vent their frustration. If google results are Mr Kinnear's biggest concern right now I think his union's members will be added to the list of people who don't like him.
But in any event, I am not trying to prove anything. I am proposing that we have a long way to go before we can feel happy about the situation with respect to real people being victimized by vandals. People are using Wikipedia to carry out vendettas against people.
A vendetta would be a protracted campaign. In this case more a large number of random individuals.
I make no apologies for saying that we should think hard about how to stop that from happening.
We have. So far the only results have been an experiment that fails to meet even a low level of scientific rigour and and a bunch of power tripping BLPers. As long as you continue to look for top down solutions expect much the same result.