On Nov 6, 2007 1:54 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Along that line of thinking, on Wikipedia it's not "I don't mind the fact that looking up a connector on Wikipedia might instead bring up some child porn that could get me fired from work and investigated by the police" ... it's either complete unawareness or "it won't happen to me".
This seems to me a hysterical response, though. Or, at least, I would expect that if this had happened in practice, we'd have a news story about a guy who was fired from work and investigated by the police because the [[SCSI]] article had child porn.
It's an overstatement. But you're kidding yourself if you don't think it will happen eventually.
We've had childporn vandalism. We've had people claim to get in trouble at work because of WP vandalism. And, of course, people have been fired in relation to their statements.
The issue I have here is that I have an easier time finding concrete damage caused by overzealous vandal-fighters than I have finding concrete damage caused by vandalism. (Note that I am defining damage here as a negative effect beyond the initial bad thing - obviously each instance of a bad page being served up and each instance of a mis- applied warning is bad in and of itself. But the warning seems to cause more negative effects after it takes place, whereas the bad page being served up seems to wrap itself up somewhat neatly.)
Like I said at the start of this thread... concrete examples would be really really helpful. I think we need to educate through examples.
I've been looking at the use of the boilerplate warnings, and I'm finding a lot of cases where I'm wondering why we warned rather than blocking. (For an example, Look at the talk page of the author of the vandalism diff I used earlier in the thread)