On 4/20/07, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
On 4/21/07, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
We are an encyclopedia, and an open source content project. Our objective, as a project, is to create and host content. That includes biographies of people who are alive.
Any open source project, content or code or whatever, is subject to or at risk of attacks. This is a fact of life.
Let's describe this "risk of attacks" to an "open source project" in more realistic terms: real harm done to real people on a daily basis. This isn't a bit of code that we can assign a "no warrantees" disclaimer on. We have to take the damage very seriously.
And Linus Torvalds doesn't? A vulnerabilty snuck into Linux today would potentially affect half the servers on the Internet. A vulnerability snuck into Apache would affect a vast majority of the websites on the Internet. MySQL and PostgreSQL? Perl? Billions of dollars are at stake with those. Not being personally responsible for the goof wouldn't make the horrific consequences go away.
Existing presumably accidental vulnerabilities in all the above DO constitute a major fact of life for IT staff and managers, and cause security exposures somewhere on the net on a daily basis, with real financial and employement and privacy effects on real people. Every day.
We should take damage that Wikipedia can cause to people seriously. And we do. BLP sets the policy framework, that what you say about live people has to be better sourced and more neutral if it's at all negative, and then some. People watch biographies as closely as any other single class of articles. The stable versions upgrade to Mediawiki will hopefully eliminate the driveby anon or throwaway account bio vandalism problem, and that upgrade is if ambiguously off in the distance at least a well understood, well agreed to technical upgrade in the works.
Society and the law say that you have to treat people's reputations with some care. But the standards for that care are far below what Wikipedia already does. We can hold ourselves to higher standards, and we do. If we try to set those standards too high, we hamstring the project's goals to build the encyclopedia and create both open content and a site and technology to promote the creation of more open content.
There seems to be a strong argument being put forth here that we're neglegent by legal and/or societal standards in our handling of living persons biographies. We aren't. We're one of the better sites on the Internet from those perspectives. We should neither be complacent or underestimate the scope of the problem or be insensitive to how people feel when they're bitten by it, nor cripple the project and denigrate ourselves endlessly for the fact that it is still a major issue.
We're doing OK. Don't break it trying to "Fix" it.