On 24/05/07, Joe Szilagyi szilagyi@gmail.com wrote:
What could qualify? The person needs to demonstrate or illustrate harm that Wikipedia has caused them. "I don't want an article on me," doesn't count. Wikipedia itself in it's role as a Huge Ultra Mega Site With Stuff On You needs to be causing you harm counts--show us and tell us what happened, and we'll help you if we can. If you drove drunk, embezzled money, or are a notable whack-job, and we simple report on that, no, that doesn't count. You're a notable drunk or whack-job already.
(...)
I am, ethically, a little disturbed by making "we have harmed you" a requirement for us to do the correct thing. We should prefer a method that prevents harm to one that mitigates it, where possible.
Other problems with this proposal:
a) We get a nuclear option for the worst cases. Frankly, we already have a nuclear option for the worst cases, it's called Doc :-)
a) ii) More seriously, what about the lesser cases? The ones where the person hasn't complained as such, or where it's still a very shoddy page but isn't explicitly "harmful", or... The proposal should in theory not affect how we deal with these at all, but in practice I forsee us getting laxer and laxer with these simply because a more draconian upper level exists "and you can take it to them if you have a problem", etc. This is the way the community thinks...
b) Define "harm". No, really. I note that in many jurisdictions, you do not even need to show that a malicious attack piece caused anyone to think the less of you in order to win a defamation case - only that it plausibly *would* have caused them to think the worse of you and that they plausibly could have seen it.