Will Johnson wrote:
And I... will continue to give a good faith belief
that previous editors
have edited conscientiously.
Most of the extant text in Wikipedia was edited by conscientious
editors. But there are plenty of exceptions, sometimes rather
startling.
I wouldn't be black-and-white about any of this. New, untested
editors deserve an assumption of good faith, too.
It's fine to be tentatively suspicious when an anonymous editor
commenting on a BLP claims to be the subject of the BLP -- it's
true, he might not be. But by the same token, one should also be
tentatively suspicious that any given bit of data currently in
Wikipedia might be wrong. (We remind our readers to be guardedly
suspicious before blindly accepting anything that's written in
Wikipedia as fact -- and we ought to maintain that suspicion, too.)
The burden of disproof is more on the shoulders of new
untested editors,
than it is on the community at-large.
But remember: the *real* burden of proof/disproof is on the
editor who actually makes a change, not on the new, untested
editor who might have been merely the first person to point out
that the change was necessary.