On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:02 PM, Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 10, 2008, at 1:48 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
A sad case in point being the scientologist driven campaign to shut down The anon.penet.fi server. The Observer was spoofed by them into reporting that 90% of child porn on the internet is trafficed by the server. Even though The Observers own readers wrote in in huge volume that that was quite preposterous, espescially as Julf had put severe restrictions on the size of emails that could be sent through penet, and yet, The Observer never admitted it had erred, but merely pedaled down the story by noting that "Johan Helsingius had consistently denied the allegations." Which is a very poor form of apology for getting the story wrong.
To my mind, this settles the issue. There are clearly instances where accuracy and truth are pre-requisites for material. We simply do not report absurd slanders like this. Anybody who does not understand this should find a different project.
-Phil
This may be a case for WP:IAR.
OTOH, Phil, you need to realise that Wikipedia does not exist to fix things the rest of the world has got wrong.
RR