On 3/13/07, Stan Shebs stanshebs@earthlink.net wrote:
The idea that anybody famous can call up the WP office
I think I explicitly said that the office shouldn't be involved at all in this.
Just as we need to be known for not allowing corporations to buy slanted coverage, we need it to be known that celebrities can't get the slant they want just by asking.
It's not about slant. It's mostly about very basic, undisputed fact corrections where the only objection is a dogmatic "Oh, you may *say* your birth date is so-and-so, but can you *prove it with a reliable source*"?. If there's no consensus for inclusion, then it wouldn't be included, except in some cases as an attributed statement.
I'm not concerned about a slippery slope here. Wikipedians tend to be pretty paranoid the moment anyone vaguely connected to an article says anything (and rightly so). Policy and processes are built on consensus; there will be no consensus for anything sinister. What I propose is not sinister, it is reasonable.
Putting statements on blogs or websites is one way of making them "official", but not the only way, and has its own problems (websites disappear, especially those that were just set up to make some Wikipedia editor happy). IMHO it would be perfectly fine for Wikipedia to accept such statements & corrections directly, and to refer to them as <ref>correction/statement submitted by XX, ticket ID #123, received ...</ref>. The main issue here is verifying identity, but that could be handled by trusted people who have access to the respective OTRS queue.
I agree that it is silly to <ref> diffs and talk pages, but having a specific tracking system (which we incidentally are using already anyway) be put to use for this strikes me as completely sound.
This is better than just letting subjects edit directly (because we can trace it, because humans act as COI filters, and because we can implement peer-to-peer methods of verification), and it certainly seems a lot more reasonable to me than current practices.