On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 2:30 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote:
The exceptions are not "human lives". They
are "human discomfort". No one
is dying.
You have to have a rather thin skin, or very little real-world experience to
be greatly annoyed at some vandal calling you a "slimy ass bitch" or
whatever. It should be relatively apparent that our readers can read through
vandalism. Are people going to complain? Sure they are.
In the extreme case, things can be worse than that. The most serious
BLP cases are not insults and vandalism, but outright malicious
attempts to destroy someone's reputation and cause them damage in
their lives. We've had a fair few of those.
Yes, the vast majority are simply stupid vandalism, but it is
inaccurate to extend that to all cases.
I think, too, that both the serious case I mention above and the
stupid vandalism case are pretty uncontroversial; we know what to do
with them when we find them, the only issue is whether we want to make
it harder to make such damage given the tradeoffs.
The hard case is when Wikipedia is repeating allegations that we can
source to an offsite source. That's where the serious disagreements
about what to do are taking place.
-Matt