On Nov 6, 2007, at 11:43 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Nov 6, 2007 11:31 AM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
Mine, at least, is to point out that we seem to be having no problems skyrocketing in the Alexa rankings and in popularity despite this. That does not mean we should not fight vandalism. But it does mean that our userbase seems relatively accepting of the fact that sometimes you'll load an article on Earl Grey tea and get a picture of a man's distended anus. Yes, we get a few upset e-mails from people who are not accepting of this every day at OTRS. But it doesn't seem to be having a crippling effect on our perceived usability at present.
The trivial counter to your argument is that there have been plenty of products that caused harm slowly enough or at a infrequently enough rate that LOTS of people still purchased/used them.
It's not that people who smoke think "I don't mind cancer", it's that they don't experience the negative effects often enough to encourage them to make another decision.
Along that line of thinking, on Wikipedia it's not "I don't mind the fact that looking up a connector on Wikipedia might instead bring up some child porn that could get me fired from work and investigated by the police" ... it's either complete unawareness or "it won't happen to me".
This seems to me a hysterical response, though. Or, at least, I would expect that if this had happened in practice, we'd have a news story about a guy who was fired from work and investigated by the police because the [[SCSI]] article had child porn.
Or maybe I'm just old fashioned in thinking that there are way to define success or correctness which don't consider popularity. ;)
Sure. We should try to make the encyclopedia better. But we have to remember that for our project better doesn't *just* mean serving up accurate and well-written articles. It also means meeting a standard of usability.
The issue I have here is that I have an easier time finding concrete damage caused by overzealous vandal-fighters than I have finding concrete damage caused by vandalism. (Note that I am defining damage here as a negative effect beyond the initial bad thing - obviously each instance of a bad page being served up and each instance of a mis- applied warning is bad in and of itself. But the warning seems to cause more negative effects after it takes place, whereas the bad page being served up seems to wrap itself up somewhat neatly.)
-Phil