On 12/19/05, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/18/05, Keith Old keithold@gmail.com wrote:
We need to pay particular attention to the biographies of contemporary biographies especially of controversial figures.
This is so head-poundingly obvious that I'm quite shocked that it's being described as "another problem looming for Wikipedia." It's a constant problem for any information conduit, whether a magazine publisher, a corporate email system, or a radio station.
What do you do? You run a help desk, you take notice of complaints. If your operation has American users, you make sure nobody who thinks he has a first amendment right to keep on inserting unfounded nonsense into articles remains able to do so.
Every publishing concern the size of Wikipedia has been sued. Often.
Raise a legal fund. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Folks,
I think that the problem has been sorted out. Nevertheless, it could have been a sizable problem for us.
Nevertheless, we have a responsibility to ensure that our processes are as good as we can get them. Taking notice of complaints is not always sufficient. Jimmy Wales took notice of the Siegenthaler matter as soon as he became aware of it. Nevertheless, it didn't stop it from becoming a problem for us in the media. While a legal fund is worthwhile, we don't want to spend money on defending cases in court that could go towards buying more servers.
We need mechanisms to pick up problem articles as soon as possible. Further, we need to look at warning people about inserting defamatory material into Wikipedia every time they edit.
Regards
*Keith Old*
Keith Old