Stan Shebs wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
What does Siegenthaler want? Does he want Wikipedia to stop allowing volunteer contributors? Does he want Congress to remove the protections given to ISPs for merely carrying content produced by others? Does he want to take away the ability of Internet speakers to be anonymous? Does he want to start licensing or bonding people who produce content to distribute over the Internet?
Maybe he just wants more awareness around the problem, which is certainly more complex than Wikipedia's involvement in the issue.
My read is that his reaction was fundamentally "OMG, I had no idea all this was going on". The allegations would have been just as problematic had they appeared on a random blog - freepers and stormfronters would have been perfectly happy to have them posted on their sites - so his complaints apply to most of the net, have little to do with WP specifically (but of course we want to be a much better reference than the average website).
People that are just now discovering the Internet are simply not going to have any idea how deep it goes. WP is simply one novel project among millions, even the experts have trouble keeping up with the weird stuff that's being tried out every day (the dot com bust has become a dot star boom...)
That's about it, which is why I feel that those who are questioning Seigenthaler's motives are being a little unfair. There are any number of people and groups who are not happy with the lack of control over the internet. They would much rather that it reflect their view of the world It all comes down to a question of how we minimize the credibility of the bad actors. They aren't going to stop their vandalism; we just need to make sure that the cure is not worse than the disease.
Ec