I wrote on wikien-l:
Matt Brown wrote:
Katefan0 wrote:
Mr. Sigenthaler's recent experience has encouraged me to send you
this note. As you know, I have been the subject of some discussion in one of the pages you administer. Some of those comments I consider libelous. I strongly suggest that you, as the party responsible for this article and discussion, and/or Wiki executives take immediate action to purge such false and irresponsible statements, and block such from occurring in the future.
Please forward this to Wiki executives. I look forward to your speedy response.
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
Seconded. This is an invitation to every POV pusher who doesn't like criticism.
I should emphasise here I don't mean John Siegenthaler - or, without knowledge of the case, the person who wrote to Katefan0. I've dealt with a number of cases of perfectly normal and decent people who understand and respect our mission as an NPOV encyclopedia, but are unhappy at being slandered by conspiracy-obsessed nutters who just won't quit and aren't quite sure what to do about it. Usually we work it out okay with a close watch on the article and (possibly) suitable penalties for the antisocial editor. A recent example is [[User:AI]] on [[David S. Touretzky]] (which AI started as a slander page and has now been NPOVed quite well) and [[Keith Henson]] (which AI didn't start but got heavily to work on).
However, we have *plenty* of the other sort. Examples include [[Sollog]], [[Daniel Brandt]], [[Ashida Kim]], [[John Byrne]] (yep, the famous comics artist), [[Barbara Schwarz]] ... I am *greatly* reluctant to let people bowdlerise their article because they don't like notable and well-documented facts.
Our concern is much more with getting things right than it is to inexpertly second-guess the law. It's also far more within our expertise! And once a case *comes to the community's attention*, the article tends to get watchlisted by skilled and experienced editors who will have familiarised themselves with the subject.
This may require removing particularly bad revisions in extreme cases after due consideration, though that's a lot of tedious work that's easily undone with one new edit re-adding the crap. But IMO, we can't get into a habit of removing negative information on first request just like that.
[cc: to arbcom list for consideration]
- d.
"David Gerard" wrote
I am *greatly*
reluctant to let people bowdlerise their article because they don't like notable and well-documented facts.
I'm up to my elbows with one of these ([[Acharya S]], currently on AfD). One has to operate _without noticing_ that one of our users may be, or claims to be, the subject of the article. Anything else is madness. We cannot take more notice of fair criticism, just because it is the person in question (well, one does, but we should respond in the same way).
Charles
Thanks David. Please let me know what they say.
I'd like to reiterate that the information I am assuming he's unhappy with wasn't backed up by sourcing, it was just a crazy rant about his relationship with UT and his book being biased.
K.
----- Original Message ---- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org; Arbitration Committee mailing list arbcom-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 6:35:39 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout
I wrote on wikien-l:
Matt Brown wrote:
Katefan0 wrote:
Mr. Sigenthaler's recent experience has encouraged me to send you
this note. As you know, I have been the subject of some discussion in one of the pages you administer. Some of those comments I consider libelous. I strongly suggest that you, as the party responsible for this article and discussion, and/or Wiki executives take immediate action to purge such false and irresponsible statements, and block such from occurring in the future.
Please forward this to Wiki executives. I look forward to your speedy response.
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
Seconded. This is an invitation to every POV pusher who doesn't like criticism.
I should emphasise here I don't mean John Siegenthaler - or, without knowledge of the case, the person who wrote to Katefan0. I've dealt with a number of cases of perfectly normal and decent people who understand and respect our mission as an NPOV encyclopedia, but are unhappy at being slandered by conspiracy-obsessed nutters who just won't quit and aren't quite sure what to do about it. Usually we work it out okay with a close watch on the article and (possibly) suitable penalties for the antisocial editor. A recent example is [[User:AI]] on [[David S. Touretzky]] (which AI started as a slander page and has now been NPOVed quite well) and [[Keith Henson]] (which AI didn't start but got heavily to work on).
However, we have *plenty* of the other sort. Examples include [[Sollog]], [[Daniel Brandt]], [[Ashida Kim]], [[John Byrne]] (yep, the famous comics artist), [[Barbara Schwarz]] ... I am *greatly* reluctant to let people bowdlerise their article because they don't like notable and well-documented facts.
Our concern is much more with getting things right than it is to inexpertly second-guess the law. It's also far more within our expertise! And once a case *comes to the community's attention*, the article tends to get watchlisted by skilled and experienced editors who will have familiarised themselves with the subject.
This may require removing particularly bad revisions in extreme cases after due consideration, though that's a lot of tedious work that's easily undone with one new edit re-adding the crap. But IMO, we can't get into a habit of removing negative information on first request just like that.
[cc: to arbcom list for consideration]
- d. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/13/05, Katefan0 katefan0@yahoo.com wrote:
I'd like to reiterate that the information I am assuming he's unhappy with wasn't backed up by sourcing, it was just a crazy rant about his relationship with UT and his book being biased.
We can't stop crazy rants and we can't go around deleting each one from article histories - removing them from the current version should be enough in almost all cases.
In many cases we should consider removing them from the article's talk page (but not its history).
-matt
One problem I've noticed is that so many anons are editing that entire pages of edit histories consist of anon edits. Many are fine, some superb, but some are dodgy. In the past, with a smaller database of articles we could pretty much guarantee that most if not all would be checked by others and errors corrected. But all too often things don't seem to be being checked.
The problem for users who see a long list of anon edits is that they don't know if they are perfectly OK edits that have been looked at by others and not thought to need correction (hence the absence of usernic edits) or if they simply have never been checked. All too often, faced with a massive list of anon edits, the approach of people (myself included) has been to look at a sample edit and see if it was a good edit or a vandalistic edit. If it was good, then we presume they were a serious contributor don't look at each edit. While reading the up-to-date article is all very well, the problem is that some perfectly valid content may well have been deleted somewhere along the line. But unless we check each edit, or go back to sample pages we don't know if something valid was dumped by someone at some stage and not noticed when a genuine user came in directly afterwards and made a good edit of the surviving test.
What WP needs is some way to ensure that users can tell if anon edits were checked. That way we can spot those that weren't and not have people duplicating checks on good anon edits. Perhaps the page history should include a review box that could be ticked by a named user to indicate that they checked the text at that point. It doesn't have to mean a formal approval of the text, merely to let people know that someone had looked at it.
I know there are users I from experience trust implicitly. I know the quality of their work. Seeing that say John Kenney had glanced over an edit on a royal biographical page would be enough for me to know, going by his ability, that I don't have to recheck. Similarly a review of a page had been looked over by Izehar, Michael Hardy, Mav or tons of others means I don't have to spend ages checking things.
Right now, because we don't know who has checked what stuff some stuff is being checked to death, while other articles are not being checked at all. It would be a big help if we could spot the checked and unchecked articles and so focus our attentions on those that need a check.
Thom
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On 14/12/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
Right now, because we don't know who has checked what stuff some stuff is being checked to death, while other articles are not being checked at all. It would be a big help if we could spot the checked and unchecked articles and so focus our attentions on those that need a check.
Incidentally, my understanding is that CDVF (which I must play with) handles this okayish; it tags individual diffs as looked at or not.
This is especially a problem with watchlists. I log on, glance down the watchlist from the previous night... hmm. There's an eight-hour old edit to [[Liberalism]]; it won't be vandalism, since a dozen eyes will have checked it, but there's a forty-minute old one to [[Neil Armstrong]] that probably is. And these normally safe assumptions are what leads to us losing three quarters of a page for a week every now and again...
A lot of IP users add or remove something, and then immediately revert it. I quite often rollback these - even though there's overall no change - simply so that people don't waste time looking at the diff. Never sure if it helps or not, but...
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 12/14/05, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:
A lot of IP users add or remove something, and then immediately revert it. I quite often rollback these - even though there's overall no change - simply so that people don't waste time looking at the diff. Never sure if it helps or not, but...
That's a good idea, but I don't think it works -- the software won't accept an edit of nothing, and your "edit" won't show up in the history. That's my experience at least.
Nathaniel (Spangineer)
On 14/12/05, Tom Cadden thomcadden@yahoo.ie wrote:
Right now, because we don't know who has checked what stuff some stuff is being checked to death, while other articles are not being
checked
at all. It would be a big help if we could spot the checked and
unchecked
articles and so focus our attentions on those that need a check.
Incidentally, my understanding is that CDVF (which I must play with) handles this okayish; it tags individual diffs as looked at or not.
This is especially a problem with watchlists. I log on, glance down the watchlist from the previous night... hmm. There's an eight-hour old edit to [[Liberalism]]; it won't be vandalism, since a dozen eyes will have checked it, but there's a forty-minute old one to [[Neil Armstrong]] that probably is. And these normally safe assumptions are what leads to us losing three quarters of a page for a week every now and again...
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- Nathaniel C. Sheetz http://www.personal.psu.edu/ncs124
Hi,
The problem for users who see a long list of anon edits is that they don't know if they are perfectly OK edits that have been looked at by others and not thought to need correction (hence the absence of usernic edits) or if they simply have never been checked. All too often, faced with a massive list
In other words: an article last edited by an anon is ambiguous: either it hasn't been checked, or it has been checked and accepted. However, an article last edited by a user is equally bad: either it was checked and fixed (reverted), checked and improved further, or wasn't checked but improved in some other area (eg, typo, interwiki link etc). In other words, Wiki lacks a way of rating/checking articles/changes. I've often thought it would be good to be able to comment on changes in the history. Say an anon changes a population figure. I would like to flag it and say "can someone check this", while making some unrelated change. My unrelated change can easily bury their possibly malicious change....
Steve