Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact.
If you don't know if it contained references or not (it didn't, it was just a short series of spectacularly wrong fabrications), then why do you feel qualified to say that "the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious."
If the mistakes were obvious, the edit patroller who edited the article would have caught them.
That's a spectacularly bad bit of reasoning. The mistakes *were* obvious, and the edit patroller *did not* catch them. Those are the simple facts of the case. The question we must ask ourselves is: why?
Simply pre-defining "obvious mistakes" as "anything an edit patroller catches" in a tautological fashion is absurd and in my opinion mere trolling.
Imagine this conversation:
Q: "How does wikipedia police new articles?" A: "We have new pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors." Q: "What happened with Seigenthaler?" A: "The errors weren't obvious." Q: "?!?!! What makes you say that." A: "If they were obvious, we would have caught them, since we have new pages patrollers who catch all the obvious errors."
*cough*
This line of thought completely ignores ALL the important questions like: are human errors possible? Are our systems well-designed to minimize human error? How did this error happen?
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
--Jimbo