Delirium wrote:
The more such ancillary concerns influence things, the worse for the content, in my opinion.
I thought I'd elaborate a bit on this, because I think various people are operating under fundamentally different assumptions of how Wikipedia should operate, and how its operation affects things outside itself.
From my perspective, the sole goal of Wikipedia should be to produce an encyclopedia that is as complete and accurate as possible. Any policy changes that contribute to that are welcome. For example, we could decide that Wikipedia is getting big enough to warrant being more judicious about what we write: require more stringent referencing, and remove (at least temporarily) unreferenced facts, especially ones that seem questionable. That's starting to happen already. We could also better label how good specific articles (and revisions) are. That would allow us to have good articles interspersed with work-in-progress articles, while keeping errors in the work-in-progress versions from being too damaging to the overall trustworthiness of our information (because those articles would be clearly marked as "in progress"). We have tags that do that to some extent (dispute tags, references-needed tags, etc.), and the long-anticipated sifter project (or whatever it's called now) would do it to a greater extent.
There is another viewpoint: that we should take into account concerns other than the overall accuracy of the encyclopedia. On this account, inaccurate negative information about living people is worse than other types of inaccurate information, and so should be treated specially. I disagree with that. It's certainly a direct case where harm could come about, but there are many other cases where much more harm could come about. Yes, if it's inaccurate, someone could read our article on [[Jack Thompson (lawyer)]] and get unwarranted negative views of him. But if we have inaccurate articles, someone could also read our articles on the Israeli-Arab conflict and come away with unwarranted views of *that*. The latter sort of inaccuracy has the potential to have a much greater negative effect on many more people than defaming Jack Thompson ever could.
There are a lot more examples, but the main point is that there are a *lot* of potential errors that could cause real-world problems if people read them and believe them. Defamatory information on specific individuals is neither the only nor the most problematic type of error. Therefore, trying to make fine-grained decisions about which errors are worse than others, and setting up special processes to deal with the ones deemed to be worse, is entirely the wrong approach, and likely to lead *neither* to a more accurate encyclopedia on the whole, *nor* to a reduction in the negative effects inaccuracies in Wikipedia have on real people. A better approach, in my view, is to attack the problem directly.
We don't want errors at all. Referencing standards and the like attack this problem, and perhaps there are additional things we could change. Since a work-in-progress is rarely error-free, we also want to better mark how trustworthy particular revisions should be considered, which will reduce the negative impact of any inaccuracies in the versions clearly marked "hey this might not be right!". Various tags and a future sifter project address this issue. And, finally, we want a streamlined way to vet facts. A number of things address this problem: a more intuitive referencing system (with references attached to specific bits of information); community culture about referencing and dealing with controversies; facilitation by the Foundation to pass along inaccuracies reported by people who don't edit Wikipedia; and so on.
Of course, legal issues may intervene in some cases; if the Foundation is the target of legal threats or lawsuits, then they can do what their lawyers advise them. The main issue at hand, though, is what we should do in other cases.
-Mark