Matt Brown wrote:
On 3/14/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Should we extend this to a general policy?
No. Allowing pedophile-fears to define our policy is an even more extreme example of letting the edge cases define the general than we already do. I emphatically do not agree with barring subject experts from participating in articles on their specialty, and that is what this kind of policy will end up doing. After all, it's hard to be an expert in anything and not have strong opinions about the topic, one way or another.
Rather, we should simply be strict about our existing policies like NPOV, and ensuring that pedophiles and their apologists do not get to slant articles in their direction - especially since theirs is an extreme minority viewpoint, and the NPOV policy states that views held by an extreme minority do NOT have to get equal space (or indeed any space, in some cases).
I agree wholeheartedly, which is why I find Jimbo's actions on [[en:Justin Berry]] so disturbing. I have no problems banning a user (either entirely, or from certain types of articles) if they can't edit neutrally; I have no problems reverting their non-neutral edits and removing inaccurate/slanted information; and so on. A blanket prohibition on any text ever touched by the user being in the article, though---even going so far as to insist that their neutral contributions be independently rewritten by someone else---seems to be a bit of a witch-hunt. Is there a legitimate reason for it besides fear that some jackass in the media is going to say "lol wikipedia lets pedophiles edit articles relating to pedophilia"? Self-identified Satanists who've edited [[en:Satanism]] had better hope the U.S. media doesn't have a recurrence of its 1990s moral panic over Satanism!
-Mark