Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Jun 12, 2006, at 12:40 AM, Stan Shebs wrote:
So how is working on WP fundamentally different from selling items on eBay, getting into arguments on Usenet, or sending patches to a Linux mailing list? You play around on the net, you're going to be visible to the whole world, for better or worse. The archives still record various stupid things I wrote in public over two decades ago, they are never going away.
Or for that matter, from posting on MySpace.
Which, of course, is working overtime to protect its members from getting killed. Similarly, eBay offers an extensive array of protections to its users.
And these are profitmaking ventures with budgets many orders of magnitude greater than WP. Scaling down to WP size will net you maybe 200USD/year for a protection fund, not much you can do with that.
We've got all these editors who get all kinds of egoboo from the credit for working on a top-20 website, and who apparently don't reflect that it means they're being scrutinized by that many millions of eyeballs, not all of them friendly. WP is a serious endeavour, not a toy - for each WP edit, I consider whether I would be willing to show it to a family member, discuss it in a job interview, etc. If editors aren't thinking about all this, perhaps the login creation page needs to explain it better.
And? I do that with everything I post on the Internet. Only problem is, it's tough to think "What is a psychopath going to think of this?"
Psychopaths have been on the net from the beginning, I've run into a few. You want to play on the bigtime websites, you're signing up for bigger risks.
(I thought teenagers couldn't edit without parental approval anyway, since they don't have legal standing to agree to GFDL.)
We have teenage admins who I'm pretty sure we did not get permission slips from.
We should be identifying and booting all underage editors (admin status is irrelevant, from legal pov) until their parents have been informed of the risks and give permission.
Stan