Michael Bimmler wrote:
On 3/30/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 3/30/07, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
I'm sorry, with due respect to Geni, this is the type of myopic response that drives me crazy. Let's worry about our policies, in house-rules, and that the rights of Wikipedians are respected - because that's obviously more important than doing the Right Thing, unharming real people, or otherwise focusing on article quality? (That was sarcasm).
Wikipedians are real people. You are not an infallible judge of what would improve an article. The community at the present time has not indicated a willingness to trust you in that sense and you should respect this.
Maybe it's time to clarify briefly what the ultimate goal of the project "Wikipedia" is:
A. To write a encyclopedia (with the labels associates such as "quality", "accuracy" and "neutrality" B. To have a nice little community thing, where we have endless votes and discussions about the (inclusion of the) messed-up divorce of John Doe, biologist.
Of course, certain internal policies (or house-rules) are necessary and should also be applied, but there are certain things on the world which overrule house rules. These "certain things" are not limited to legal aspects but also our aim to have an **encyclopedia** which is as accurate as possible, as neutral as possible and which does not seek to destroy somebody's life by bringing up every dirty little fact about their life that can be found. Remember, our guides (and competitors) should be encyclopediae as the EB and neither tabloid papers as The Sun nor investigative bloggers which dig through court records et al. to find out interesting things about George W. Bush's former life. Both of these have their merits (the latter maybe more than the former) but this is not what an encyclopedia should do. And if somebody tries to insert not properly sourced harmful material into a biography of a living person, this should just be deleted on sight. If a policy cannot cope with a) reality amd b) the absolute goal of the project, you should change neither reality nor the goal of the project but the policy.
Michael
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Which is precisely why we have IAR. Doc