On 8/28/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 8/28/07, Puppy puppy@killerchihuahua.com wrote:
Utter nonsense. For example, the president and the entire secret service as well as judges and the police are all public servants, paid from the publics pocketbook. And they all have confidential and secret information, and taxpayers demanding they "tell all" or risk public censure is beyond naive, its destructive, self and otherwise.
However there are mechanisms in place for independent oversight.
There are multiple mechanisms in Wikipedia's structure for independent oversight: the Foundation's Board, Jimmy, Arbcom, the Checkuser community, Mike Godwin, the (er, whoever the board put in place to review CU / privacy issues, the ombudsperson? My apologies, I only had two hours of sleep and forget the title), and to the degree it's public a thousand-odd admins and all the normal editors.
Not all of them can simultaneously come into play at every level of sensitive case, by nature. But they're there.
Either the system works... we are mostly honorable people, and have enough honest and principled people that if something seriously sinister started someone would stand up and publically announce it and call for it to end.
Or it does not work, in which case we're waiting for someone malign enough to exploit the system and turn Wikipedia into a nasty private playground for an in crowd.
I chose to believe that the system works. I see no reason to believe that there's anyone who is actively involved who is seriously *un*trustworthy; I think that I've seen varying levels of mistakes from many people, and have made my fair share. But I believe in the integrity of the people and the fundamental processes. The idea that we could find a group of evil-minded cabalists capable enough to fake it in public and then do dirty deeds in private sufficiently large and talented to "run" wikipedia behind the scenes seems beyond farfetched into paranoia.