On 10/20/06, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Steve Block wrote:
Anthony wrote:
What should we do with that? {{fact}} tag it? Remove it? Leave it as is? Personally I'd say it should be removed. I just removed, without logging in, the whole paragraph, which was nothing more than speculation regarding this "perception". Let's see what happens.
Don't fancy putting it back in, do you?
Never mind, I've done it, now let's see what happens.
It's starting to look good to me. Hopefully these new changes will stick around.
I have to wonder about WP:POINT here, the edit war that started could so easily have been avoided by searching google for the term GNU viral.
Frankly, if it were up to me I wouldn't devote so much space to this comment by Craig Mundie. I think the encyclopedia is better now than it was before, but if it were up to me I'd remove the entire "criticisms" section.
So yeah, it's possible if I had searched google for the term GNU viral I would have come up with exactly the quote you're talking about, would have made the change, and we would have saved a few edits. It's also possible I would have noticed all the uses of the term "viral" to describe the GPL being made by people who weren't critics, and would have changed the paragraph in a completely different way.
Still, the encyclopedia got improved and no-one got hurt. I'm hoping we're all learning the lesson here that we might not be as bad as we actually think we are for reliability, but that the lack of sourcing and how we source and represent those sources in the articles is becoming an issue.
Reliability isn't really the problem with these sorts of statements. POV is more the problem when you throw out these fringe statements, attribute them to "critics", and then proceed to prove them wrong. It's the problem with the GPL article (which is far from fixed in my opinion, in two days we've fixed one paragraph of it). And it's also the problem with the original quote by Jimbo (the idea that proponents of political correctness perceive the term "blackboard" as improper is so ludicrous that it amounts to nothing more than picking on the political correctness movement).
Anthony