So you run a site that publishes criticism of Wikipedia and such a high profile company as Google and you expect not to be written about yourself. Looks like a double standard to me. Mgm On 4/20/07, James Farrar <james.farrar(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On 4/20/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Would it be an accceptable compromise to revert the article to the version Brandt declared himself happy with in October 2005, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daniel_Brandt&oldid=25614242 update it a little, add some citations, then protect it for a longish period until feelings have died down? If Brandt reciprocates by refraining from commenting elsewhere on Wikpedia issues, the excitement over his bio will diminish and most reasonable people will be too bored to start the issue up again when it's unprotected. Part of the problem with the bio is that it has been unstable -- 2446 edits by 718 unique editors, including 271 IP addresses, which is a lot for a borderline notable page. That is the core of Brandt's objection, namely that there are too many anonymous editors involved in writing it, so that he has to keep on checking it, and he feels this is a burden. The flaw in his position is that Brandt himself caused this situation by stirring up people's interest. If he would stop doing that once the page was protected, the issue would die down, and he'd be left with a brief, factual entry that would do him no harm at all. Sarah

On 4/20/07, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Semi-protection only means people must have had an account for four days before they can edit it. Brandt's issue (he says) is that he doesn't want to have to keep checking his Wikpedia entry to see whether anything's been added that he needs to deal with. Asking him to draw up a list of complaints misses the point that he doesn't want to have to do this every day, every week, every month, every year. If we could agree on a stable version, then protect it until the heat has gone out of the situation, we'd be meeting him halfway between deletion and the current situation. Being reasonable has to involve compromises on both sides. Sarah

On 4/20/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: I've always felt this was Brandt's strongest argument. Let's face it, it's kind of odd that we assume the right to expose a living person to the whims of anyone of any age anywhere in the world, people who don't have to use their real names, don't have to understand the policies, don't even have to be able to spell. It's a lot to ask of that person that they should simply acquiesce and dutifully check their bios every day for the rest of their lives, in case some 10-year-old, or a malicious enemy, has added insults or libel that thousands of people might read before it's fixed, and which Google may continue to distribute anyway. If that person doesn't get invited for a job interview because the human resources officer didn't like the sound of "John Doe became known locally in 1987 for having slept with three of his neighbors' wives on the same day," when she checked him out on Wikipedia minutes before the vandalism was reverted, well, he'll have to establish that was the reason he didn't get an interview; then he'll have to find the money to sue the Foundation; then he'll have to convince a court that the Foundation is a publisher; and, perhaps most awkwardly, he'll have to hope no evidence emerges that he really did sleep with three neighbors' wives on the same day, even though it had no bearing whatsoever on the job he ended up not getting because someone added it to Wikipedia. All in all, we ask a lot. Sarah

This is somewhat of a contradictory statement. If you are truly doing your "best" to protect people from malicious statements, how can one possibly do "more"? Now, I do agree that Wikipedia's policies have improved in regards to living persons, but that is insufficient to protect people from malicious additions. Any Joe Shmoe can add anything, and although anyone can undo it as well, it still leaves the risk that someone would fail to undo it. And this has happened in the past on several occasions that were quite embarrassing to Wikipedia and the Foundation. A permanent semi-protection might keep much of the anon vandalism away, but all one has to do is create a sockpuppet account or six and vandalize it after 4 days have passed. And this offers even greater anonymity (and consequently, less accountability) than being an "anonymous" user, or IP. True, run-of-the-mill vandals don't plan ahead like this, but it's those that *do* that Wikipedia needs to be worried about. Your anonymous school user who replaces a page with "PENIS" isn't a threat to the project, by and large. Your truly anonymous semi-established user who sneaks in defamatory statements and false citations, however... Erik Moeller wrote:

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Ken Arromdee wrote: Never mind. I saw his post after I wrote this.

Then perhaps we should drop the word 'encyclopedia' Doc

On Sun, 22 Apr 2007, MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: The person who gets hurt is not the same person who refuses to be critical enough. It's not right for us to make it easy for person A to hurt person B by refusing to be critical, then say "it's not our fault, it's just A's fault".

On 4/21/07, Seth Finkelstein <sethf(a)sethf.com> wrote: It doesn't have to. One of my first acts on Wikipedia, before I was an administrator and long before I knew much about policy, was to improve and eventually help to get rid of the biography article of a minor Usenet personage placed here by revenge trolls. In those pre-Seigenthaler days there was no "Biography of living persons" policy and we hadn't really got to grips as a community with the damage we could cause to reputations. Now we're much better organized and more aware. There is more work to do, but attitudes have changed radically over the past couple of years, and I've no doubt that this trend will continue.

On 4/20/07, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: I strongly disagree that we refuse to take any real steps to reduce the harm. There are a lot of good people who watch for bio article changes. We have additional steps and procedure and policy clearly defined for detection and handling of bio article problems. We are an encyclopedia, and an open source content project. Our objective, as a project, is to create and host content. That includes biographies of people who are alive. Any open source project, content or code or whatever, is subject to or at risk of attacks. This is a fact of life. After all the intensive efforts to set and maintain and enforce BLP policies, no outsider can reasonably claim we aren't trying. No insider is going to claim we're succeeding perfectly, either. We can't be perfect. To attain our project's goals, we have to balance technology, people's time, and policies. Lacking "approved version" code, we're doing a pretty good approximation of optimally given what our project stands for and the resource constraints. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 21/04/07, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Well, we could give up, shut down the project, and all go and do something else.

On 21/04/07, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: It would solve libel issues.

doc wrote: But IMO it's not a "real solution" to delete an article that we would otherwise have if only the subject of the article hadn't asked us to delete it. Adding the exemption for biographies already in Britannica would just make Wikipedia's coverage even more nonsensical and arbitrary. There's nothing magical about Britannica's standards that makes biographies problem-free and it would introduce a whopping great systemic bias.

On 21/04/07, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Trying to make a change without analysing its problems is not the best idea in the world.

George Herbert wrote: Gosh, you really don't get it do you? We're not talking about Brandt and mildly critical stuff on a well-written and highly monitored article. We are talking about downright libels, negative spinning, and outrageous lies. We are talking about biographies that have pulled together every detail of a minor small-town scandal, and ignored any positive information whatsoever. People have an absolute right not to be subjected to that "WarmFuzzyPedia" or not. We insist on NPOV BLP and V, but we are hosting thousands of biographies that do not comply with these policies and we have structures that have manifestly proven inadequate in dealing with them. If we host bios - we have a duty of care to the subject. We are clearly in breach of that duty. Yes, people don't get 'take down rights' in the real media - but real media is produced by writers with real names and by publishers who take legal responsibility, not written by ten year olds or clever anonymous people with a malicious grudge and then published by non-responsible foundation. People have a absolute right not to have their name googled and find that the highest ranking site (or perhaps only internet information on them) has been written by a silly slanderous schoolkid, their ex-husband's angry girlfriend, or a disgruntled ex-employee or rival out to trash them. And often these subtle attacks are on the face reading well-referenced and seemingly factual. Never spotted as simple vandalism. People have a right not have to check their own biography for hatchet jobs, and if they they do check it, and there is one, they have an absolute right to expect us to have a means of making sure it never happens again. If Wikipedia can't reasonable insure that people don't have these rights infringed, then it has no business hosting their biographies in the first place.

On 4/20/07, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Look around. There are millions of websites (blogs, home pages, YouTube videos, etc) out there with libelous material, much of it blatantly false, out there for anyone to see. Very few of those have any sort of reasonable feedback mechanism short of a libel/slander lawsuit. Some ISPs have a no-attacks policy; most don't, and those that do often have a nearly impractical hurdle getting through their abuse department. We have policies with real teeth about what is OK to have here and what isn't. We have people who enforce those policies, vigorously, once we're notified. We have people associated with the project actively looking for them, though I don't presume to suggest that we actually find enough of it ourselves. And we have a stable versions technical upgrade coming sometime. Again: Wikipedia is not the worst place on the Internet from a perspective of actually protecting people's rights not to be attacked or slandered, or at least to get it fixed if they are. It's arguably close to the best place on the Internet from those perspectives. It's maddening to see you argue elsewise. Look around you. You're assigning people a lot of rights that they don't legally or socially have. They *don't* have a right, in the United States at least, of absolute privacy against any discussion of them. They don't have a right to sue anyone who runs a website on which libel is posted, just for having hosted it, prior to being notified of it. Your argument isn't "We can't infringe people's rights". You're using that language, but it's factually incorrect. Your argument is, "We can't be mean to non-notable people". That is not legally true. It is to some degree morally true. But we have to keep that in perspective. People don't deserve to be abused. But they don't deserve to hide notable activities from the public, or from the historical record. We can destroy the encyclopedia to be nice to people. That's insane. We can keep the encyclopedia within the law and existing societal and internet norms for protecting people against abuse. And we do. We can protect them better than YouTube, MySpace, and a million other sites. And we do. We don't have to be perfect. We're an open content system, and an encyclopedia, and an internet project. We're within the norms for such projects. We care a lot about this topic, from the amount of arguing over it that happens. And that's good. But it can be taken too far. You all, today, are taking it too far. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 4/20/07, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: The law has been repeatedly mentioned. At the very least, you need to clarify "rights" as ethical, legal, moral, social expectations, etc. How about "Would you rather be hit by a car out in the middle of a desert, in the middle of a circus, or in front of the hospital?". You could at least assume good faith here. That's not a nice comment at all. I've been dealing with these problems on the Internet for over 20 years now and don't take any of them lightly. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 4/20/07, Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) <newyorkbrad(a)gmail.com> wrote: I partly agree and partly disagree with Doc's assessment, but also do agree that Wikipedia really is probably the "world's best place to be libelled"-terrible phrasing aside. If someone writes "John Doe eats babies" on Myspace, you're going to have to raise hell with Myspace to get that removed. If someone does it on Wikipedia, it will likely be caught and reverted within seconds, and even if it slips by RC patrol, the minute you notify us of it, it's gone and whoever pulled the stunt gets shown the door. We're actually one of the -most- proactive sites in the world when it comes to preventing harm and libel, as far as sites with any user-generated content go. Now, of course, I'm not really hot on the idea of having articles that barely five sentences can be written on anyway, for the reasons brought up-they just don't get patrolled well for vandalism or stupidity. I'd generally be very much for merging such bios into a larger, more heavily-patrolled article, or getting rid of them. That being said, we're talking about people of -marginal- notability. Daniel Brandt (and let's all presume he precipitated this discussion, because, well, he did) is of -unquestionable- notability. He's very voluntarily given interviews to the media and solicited public attention for his endeavors. It's certainly his right to do so. He can't, however, do all that, then turn around and say "Wait, wait, I'm not a public figure now!" when something you don't want published comes up. Brandt's article should receive the same amount of care and demand the same amount of sourcing as we always require in BLP cases, of course. But if -that's- the type of bio that will get deleted, this is a bad idea. (By the way NYBrad, what's the other issue? Now I'm curious.) Seraphimblade -- Freedom is the right to know that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.

People with a biography here have a right to force us to fix libel. Only when we fail to do that on a consistent basis *on that article* not due repetitious attempts by vandals, but due to inactivity, should deletion ever come into play. Mgm

On 4/23/07, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes. I would like to see candidates knowledgeable and willing to take on one particular admin task. If they want to work in another, they need to do the required legwork to know how things work. I still haven't applied a range block, because I know I'd mess it up. It's pointless to force someone to work in every possible admin workfield. There's so much people who are clueless about copyright that if people need to know everything, we'd need to oppose adminship of pretty much everyone when it comes to their WP:PUI and copyright speedy work. Mgm Mgm

On 4/21/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote: ... Wikipedia is dramatically different from those other sites and types of sites. Not only are Wikipedia pages about a subject far, far more prominent than some random blog post or homepage about a subject, but the Wikipedia pages are presented as fact, and not just the opinion of some random guy with a Myspace. -- Stephen Bain stephen.bain(a)gmail.com

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Bryan Derksen wrote: There is something magical about biographies in Britannica which makes biographies a lot closer to problem-free, if not actually there: If you have a biography in Britannica, you're probably notable in the everyday non-Wikipedian sense: there are lot of sources and a lot of people already talking about you, and anything that Wikipedia can say is a drop in the bucket. There's so much material about George W. Bush both on the Internet and in print that a problem with the Bush article simply isn't going to hurt Bush much, because the Wikipedia article is one out of millions and doesn't have the influence. If you don't have a biography in Britannica, your Wikipedia article is probably the top source of information on the Internet about you, or close, and any problems with that article loom large and can have a huge effect. Even if he leaves politics, nobody's going to deny George Bush a job because of something they read in his Wikipedia article. But they might to Joe Blow.

Bryan Derksen wrote: Actually, Britannica is an American company. :)

MacGyverMagic/Mgm wrote: Oh ffs, this is ridiculous. The notion that the number of biographies we have has no correlation with the failure to properly monitor and maintain them is ridiculous. Most of the real BLP issues group round biographies of little known people. Bios that be nature can only ever have information about the bit part they played in some small-town scandal, and thus can never be a balanced 'biography' of the person's life. Bios that highlight news that otherwise would be forgotten. Bios that are damaging because they may are the only public biography of the person in existence. Bios that by nature are under-watched. Bios where few will know enough to spot spin and hatchet jobs. The notion that wikipedia can't survive if we have less of these tabloidesque articles is frankly nonsense. What we've got on this list are reactionaries who don't want any change and would rather pretend that everything's jolly and no change can ever improve everything. Sure, any change will have some downsides - but that's not the end of the story. Actually, I'm more optimistic here. I believe that there are solutions that can be found if there is a willingness to find them. But we need to be allowed to explore the radical, and not have people always pretending that any change would be death of wiki-civilization. In fact, a rigid attachment to the status quo is more likely to result in that. Doc

doc wrote: Actually, when I was browsing through that list of {{unreferenced}} biographies last night I didn't come across a single one of these. The only person I found whose notoriety was due to a "scandal" actually looked pretty significant (not just some small-town thing) and had a lot of information about him out on the web. The vast majority of the little-known people with biographies were minor sports figures, singers, actors, models, race car drivers, etc. whose articles were completely non-controversial and didn't mention any scandalous events. Please don't mischaracterize those who disagree with you. I don't believe that "no change can ever improve everything", I just think that this specific change of being more aggressive about deleting biographies is not the best way to improve Wikipedia and may in fact be detrimental. As someone said elsethread, "we need to do something, this is something, therefore we need to do this" is flawed logic. Personally, I think that once stable versions are finally implemented many of the major deletionism issues that have been going on for years will fade away. That's the change I'd really like to see, it'll make Wikipedia safer for work-in-progress again.

David Gerard wrote: Man, that's going to be a showdown of epic proportions. I'll again idly note that there's some significant opposition to the idea of article stability, and nothing appears to be happening to address that. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

David Gerard wrote: I'd check out the two policy/guideline proposals regarding it. I think they're at [[Wikipedia:Stable articles]] and [[Wikipedia:Stable articles now]], or close to it. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

David Gerard wrote: I won't comment on the financial aspect of this, but I don't know if there will be some sort of "stability" feature that will gain popularity - many feel it's "unwiki" and goes against our principles. I just think it's a poor idea in general. I don't think it's unavoidable, either. Part of the draw of Wikipedia is that it's nearly always a live draft, and "stability" will only hurt that portion of it. -Jeff -- If you can read this, I'm not at home.

On 4/23/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yep. But "unwikiness" is what will happen if Wikipedia dies because of the mountains of unsourced biographies.

On 4/22/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: My own feeling on the matter is that this is probably wishful thinking. To use your example to explain my feeling on the matter, we *already* can mark the version that got FA status. In fact, it's already marked. If you click on [show] next to the featured article message, you can see quite plainly that http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Transhumanism&oldid=53177243 is when the article received FA status. Could we show by default the featured article and make people click through to the work in progress? Yes, although I'm sure it's debatable whether or not we should. If we did that, would this appease the person who's agressive in reverting changes which s/he feels is making the article worse? Probably not. Even if so, are there that many featured articles in the first place? No, so then you've gotta have good articles, and semi-good articles, and non-vandalised articles, etc. Could this be implemented well? Probably, though it would take an awful lot of time and energy to maintain even after the technical parts are implemented. Will it be implemented well? I doubt it. Anthony

Jeff Raymond wrote: Surely you exaggerate! Ec

On 22/04/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen(a)shaw.ca> wrote: Yes. The problem is that doing lots of OTRS leaves one with a ridiculously distorted view of the content of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is HUGE. And it's not run for the benefit of OTRS. I recall Submarine posting to foundation-l that the Foundation should unilaterally delete all school articles from en:wp because they caused lots of OTRS complaints. He did not bother saying one word on en:wp itself or on this list, and did not answer when asked why he had not. OTRS, it twists the mind. - d.

On 22/04/07, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote: These articles are indeed outliers, and we do know that - we do actually edit the rest of the wiki, on occasion, too! But we have one point seven something million articles as of the time of writing; the absolute number of "outliers" is very, very large. And we can't simply dismiss a problem by saying "well, relatively speaking, it's a small problem" - it's still a problem. Being exposed to it continually makes you more alert to it, but that doesn't mean it's being confabulated. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

Bryan Derksen wrote: This is consistent with what I would have expected, and is contrary to the oft proclaimed notion that we are the town scandal sheet. It's just that the scandalous minority takes up the majority of time. Ec

On 21/04/07, Blu Aardvark <jewbowales(a)wikipedia-lol.cjb.net> wrote: Or (d) had been actively harassed by Wikipedia Review (e.g. Phil Sandifer). - d.

On 4/20/07, doc <doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Here Here!! I entered Wikipedia Dispute Resolution & Arbitration in Good Faith, only to be viciously defamed in the midst of an ArbCom hearing, with ArbCom turning a blind eye, by default rubber stamping the perpetrators attacks. This problem can be ignored for two years, as seems the intent, but it *must* be dealt wioth sooner of later. Rob Smith aka Nobs01

On 21/04/07, Seth Finkelstein <sethf(a)sethf.com> wrote: But first you need to define where the line that separates the notable from the marginally-notable is.

On 21/04/07, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote: If there's no firm line, I foresee an awful lot of arguments in the grey area.

"But objectively, *most* of the objections to it seem to be pure dogma. Hence the (by now painful) circularity of argument when this topic comes up - it's driven by many other, ideological, factors besides the nominal difficulties." [That is, WP:ICantForTheLifeOfMeImagineAPolicyWhichCouldExist, is self-refuting] -- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com/ Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/ Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php

I call the belief that Wikipedia couldn't figure out a policy on this topic a laughably absurd excuse that doesn't deserve a moment of being taken seriously. It is the essence of the difference between "can't" and "doesn't want to" (with "put critics on the defensive" in the mix). -- Seth Finkelstein Consulting Programmer http://sethf.com/ Infothought blog - http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/ Interview: http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php

Seth Finkelstein wrote: Well, of course we already DO have a policy on this: WP:BLP. Arguments that suggest that any change is equivalent to "might as well shut Wikipedia down" are useless and will of course be sensibly ignored by the community. "Delete any bio if the subject objects" is pretty clearly too simplistic a policy. But I think it is entirely possible to strengthen our policies in a way that is consistent with our values and traditions, and broadly acceptable within the community. One possibility that someone mentioned the other day would be to have a shift in policy that looks something like this: Whenever the subject of a biography objects on the grounds of being non-notable, the subsequent AFD has a shifted "default"... instead of needing a "consensus to delete" we would have a "consensus to keep". Another version would say this for ALL bios of living people: For biographies of living persons, there must be a "consensus to keep" rather than a "consensus to delete". Another version would say this for ALL bios of living people: For biographies of living persons, a "majority to delete (taking into account sock puppets, and taking into account the number of edits of those participating in the discussion" shall be sufficient to delete. Another version... another version. The point is, it would not be difficult or the death of Wikipedia to lean a little bit more in the direction of structural deletionism than we have done in the past. Standards of inclusion shift all the time, and can and will shift again. We can think creatively about that, rather than engaging in rhetoric about shutting Wikipedia down. :) --Jimbo

<snip> I think this is positive. Such a shift would effectively over time reduce the number of low-notability and dubious bios we have - allowing us to focus attention on the rest. Low-notability bios are the problem as 1) they are often the only information on the subject 2) they are normally underwatched. 3) not enough people know about the subject to spot problems, imbalances and lies. At the same time, this solution leaves the community firmly in control and avoids silly decisions that delete things because technically the sourcing doesn't fall into category x. Each article gets discussed on its merits. Indeed for those who are concerned about community and democracy, this is a shift towards democracy. I'd word it: "For articles on the biographies of living people, deletion shall require only the clear balance of the debate in its favour - which shall normally consist of support of at least the majority of users expressing a relevant opinion" The notion that such a policy would 'break' wikipedia is ridiculous. It would clearly empower the community to solve some of the issues and not the reverse. And even if this solution doesn't take, it shows that there are rational alternatives to the status-quo. No need to shut the wiki down yet.

On 4/22/07, MacGyverMagic/Mgm &lt;macgyvermagic(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Huh? What does WP:COI have to do with claiming that something is defaming you? Can you expand on that? Anthony

On 4/20/07, Tony Sidaway &lt;tonysidaway(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: And Linus Torvalds doesn't? A vulnerabilty snuck into Linux today would potentially affect half the servers on the Internet. A vulnerability snuck into Apache would affect a vast majority of the websites on the Internet. MySQL and PostgreSQL? Perl? Billions of dollars are at stake with those. Not being personally responsible for the goof wouldn't make the horrific consequences go away. Existing presumably accidental vulnerabilities in all the above DO constitute a major fact of life for IT staff and managers, and cause security exposures somewhere on the net on a daily basis, with real financial and employement and privacy effects on real people. Every day. We should take damage that Wikipedia can cause to people seriously. And we do. BLP sets the policy framework, that what you say about live people has to be better sourced and more neutral if it's at all negative, and then some. People watch biographies as closely as any other single class of articles. The stable versions upgrade to Mediawiki will hopefully eliminate the driveby anon or throwaway account bio vandalism problem, and that upgrade is if ambiguously off in the distance at least a well understood, well agreed to technical upgrade in the works. Society and the law say that you have to treat people's reputations with some care. But the standards for that care are far below what Wikipedia already does. We can hold ourselves to higher standards, and we do. If we try to set those standards too high, we hamstring the project's goals to build the encyclopedia and create both open content and a site and technology to promote the creation of more open content. There seems to be a strong argument being put forth here that we're neglegent by legal and/or societal standards in our handling of living persons biographies. We aren't. We're one of the better sites on the Internet from those perspectives. We should neither be complacent or underestimate the scope of the problem or be insensitive to how people feel when they're bitten by it, nor cripple the project and denigrate ourselves endlessly for the fact that it is still a major issue. We're doing OK. Don't break it trying to "Fix" it. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

On 4/20/07, Tony Sidaway &lt;tonysidaway(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: We're not that bad. And a lot of that will get reduced with Stable Versions (taking commit rights away from most people, in software version control terms). The problem is that we can only go so far to separate biographies out and treat them differently. We can't do a complete technical solution - even some sort of biography flag could be missed or undone or subverted, and there's nothing keeping someone from putting "Mister Skinner, the school's principal, is gay and sleeps with his male students" on a School article, or in a town's article, etc. That would be just as googleable as a bio on Leonard Skinner (example from The Simpsons, hopefully there's no real school principal who will take offense at this example...). We can ban anon contributors, and make getting accounts harder. But that will cut down on contributions, and most contributions aren't vandalism, even anon contributions. We can implement stable versions. That takes "Commit" away from the teeming masses. We can continue to care about the problem and pay attention to it. But we can't make it go away. And even if we could, it wouldn't solve the MySpace/YouTube/Blogosphere problems people have with libel and online attacks. Are we a worse component of the problem than everyone else? No. Are we handling it more or less responsibly than everyone else? More. Case closed. We're ok. Not happy-no-problem ok - it's legitimately an issue. But we don't need to tear the project apart over it. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com

Tony Sidaway wrote: We don't "umm and ah" about it, we've got a number of vigorous mechanisms to deal with such problems. I think a lot of the difficulty lies in the fact that some of the "problems" that people point out about articles are not, in fact, actual problems. People claim things are libel which are not, or claim they're not public figures when they really are, etc. If someone were to submit a bug report to Linus about how they were unable to use Linux to repair the flat tire on their bicycle, it's not a problem when Linus fails to address the issue.

On 21/04/07, George Herbert &lt;george.herbert(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: The problem is, this is mitigating the harm when it appears, not reducing the potential. We can mitigate the harm, on the whole, not too shabbily. We have our patrollers and our processes, and we have a glorious technical innovation on the horizon which should catch another third or so, and we're pretty good at taking stuff out as soon as someone complains - in fact, we're sufficiently good that when I reply to a complaint about vandalism on a page, it actually seems embarassingly bad unless I can say "was only there two minutes". But let's examine the actual problem. It falls into two classes. One is routine defacement, where we are the victim, which we can handle pretty well - standard vandalism. The other is malicious editing, where the victim isn't us but is some third party. This is what Doc and I are concerned about. We can't really reduce the former, other than by limiting editing - it happens to all articles at any particular time. But the latter tends to revolve around a (fuzzily-definable) set of articles, which are - broadly speaking - mostly "contemporary individuals", with some "current issues" as well. If not looked after by a reasonably competent editor, these often devolve into hatchetjobs by one or two people with an axe to grind; once a competent editor or three has their hand in the process, though, they're usually not too bad. A large portion of these are safe - we have enough eyeballs on them that it's virtually impossible to seriously defame [[George W. Bush]] or [[Hillary Clinton]] or even anyone down to about the level of [[Nick Griffin]], for a random example. On the whole, most people with real first-class (or even third-class) importance get enough eyeballs this way; it's a truism to say that the more interesting the topic of an article to the world, the more likely it is to be maintained. And even articles on trivially notable people - obscure individuals of limited importance, the fundamentally *unimportant* articles - can be made good; all it needs is one person with a sense of decency, some common sense, and the willingness to keep checking. I have dozens or hundreds of these on my watchlist, from an article on a porn starlet where someone keeps trying to add her personal background to a computer theorist who a crank decided is Really A Man And The World Needs To Know.* So do many others; we pick them up in our normal routine. The problem is, not all of them get this care. We only have so many people willing to maintain things - this isn't a jab at people, I've reached pretty much a limit myself - and the eternal turnover means that articles which were once "curated" will eventually be unloved again. So we have these articles which are risky, and of those we have some which are looked after by the community and some which aren't. Of the latter, the subjects themselves - with admirable fortitude - keep some clean, but generally less succesfully than we can; and we have a final class of unloved, risky, articles. These are the problem. They are targets for vandalism, and the community lets them sit there. We can mitigate the harm when we become wise to it, add another article to the list of things our ever-patient users work on, but the harm's been done once - and then consider all the ones we never hear about. So what we should be considering is some way of identifying these "risky" articles and doing something about them. Perhaps the ones who are of the most risk of hatchetry plus the least general importance should be prioritised, if we can figure out an evaluation system. I don't know how we can best deal with these articles. Deleting the extreme cases is one solution, and a tempting one. Deletion is strongly unpopular; merging back into a parent topic only a bit less so. But in order to actively reduce the harm we are doing, these are the articles we need to take a good look at; we need to look at the culture we have which thinks "keep, cleanup" is a useful comment at an AFD, and then fails to do anything about it, leading to articles the community vaguely "wants kept" but which are unmaintainable. They are our most "dangerous" articles, and the least critical to our mission. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk * I wish I was making that last one up...

On 4/21/07, doc &lt;doc.wikipedia(a)ntlworld.com&gt; wrote: In other words we should find some way to monitor those articles properly. It doesn't happen now, but that doesn't we can't do it. We've set up more complex systems. If articles aren't being monitored now, deleting a bunch isn't going improve the situation, it wouldn't actually make people monitor articles. Mgm

On 4/20/07, Slim Virgin &lt;slimvirgin(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Reverting to that version would remove any mention of Wikipedia criticism. So no, I don't think that's acceptable. As for anon editors: that's what semi-protection is for. Yes, he would get a lot less attention if he stopped asking for it in the first place.

On 4/25/07, Jim &lt;trodel(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I think you just hit the nail on the head. ~~~~

On 4/20/07, Christiano Moreschi &lt;moreschiwikiman(a)hotmail.co.uk&gt; wrote: I don't think so. This has started a dialog of sorts between the community and Daniel Brandt, in which the side issues have been drowned out, for the most part, by honest attempts to address legitimate issues. This is more progress than we could have asked for just a week ago.

On 4/21/07, Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: Not quite. Notwithstanding his recent statement, see the text of his open letter of April 11th, a copy of which I have placed on the talk page of his article. In it he says "At the same time, I want to point out that the main reason I want my editing privileges restored is because I feel that I have the right to comment on my biography on the Talk page for that biography." That wish was granted, and it was apparently on his own request that he has been blocked again. Symbolism? Yes, but a very important symbol of openness and good faith.

Christiano Moreschi wrote: He wrote "I feel that Jimmy Wales made the wrong decision when he unbanned me a couple of days ago." and "I ask that Mr. Wales reconsider." --Jimbo