On Nov 6, 2007 1:54 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)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)