On 8/3/08, WJhonson@aol.com WJhonson@aol.com wrote:

In a message dated 8/3/2008 6:09:42 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time, newyorkbrad@gmail.com writes:

As I understand your position, it is that as a matter of principle, petty disputes among Wikipedia contributors (many of whom edit under their real names), as well as negative remarks about subjects of deleted articles and the like, should not only be preserved on Wikipedia itself, but they must remain readily available as top Google hits for the people in question, presumably in perpetuity. This position is not defensible.>>

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It's then a good thing I suppose that this isn't my position. My position is that we already have internal mechanisms to handle the objections you first broached.

We're not babysitters and we shouldn't act like cyber cops. If people call each other hateful names, that's what they did. The entire blame for their actions rests solely on their own shoulders. I feel no responsibility for what someone else did, and that they did it, knowing full well that others would and have seen it. That is the very nature of a public forum.

If a particular instance can be shown to require oversight, than it should, and has. That we should make a sweeping change for a few minor issues is vast overkill and in the light that there are other options.

Will Johnson

In the first place, not every instance in which indexed results reflect adversely on an individual are that individual's fault, directly or indirectly. In the second place, in the absence of truly extraordinary circumstances, no one's off-wiki life should be allowed to be adversely affected by his or her editing on Wikipedia if we can help it. In the third place, not everyone affected by this issue is a Wikipedian at all.

I also do not understand your apparent suggestion that there is no place on a continuum between publishing the details of all our onsite quarrels broadcast to the world, and actually oversighting the edits from the database (a step which truly does suppress edits from later scrutiny if it is needed, albeit for good and necessary reasons when appropriately use).

The fact that pages such as XfD, RfA, RfAr, and BLP/N went to no-index some time ago with apparently little notice or complaint suggests that your objections to this practice are more theoretical than real. I am sensitive to the value of such principle-based objections, but not when the objections are, in the opinion of most participants in the discussion, so thoroughly outweighed by the benefits of the measure proposed. I repeat the urging in my prior post that at least the pages I listed there (DRV, AN/ANI/AN3, SSP, RfCU, WQA, former CSN and PAIN, and their archives) be added to the no-indexing protocol if this has not already been done.

A post the other day reminded me of our earlier encounter in the context of a controversial deletion discussion last year. Between that discussion and this one, I am gaining the impression that you disdain any consideration of the real-life consequences of Wikipedia coverage on living people who might be affected by them, whether they be article subjects or our own contributors. I hope that is not the case.

Newyorkbrad