In a message dated 4/23/2009 1:47:18 AM Pacific Daylight Time, dgerard@gmail.com writes:
"not wrong"?>>
------------------ I disagree that "Right" and "Wrong" have any meaning in a biographical article. Rather terms such as "has no evidence", "is cited to this source" would have meaning.
Right and Wrong are such fluid creatures that we actually have courtrooms where they are debated all day and still have no justice ;)
Will
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2009/4/23 WJhonson@aol.com:
I disagree that "Right" and "Wrong" have any meaning in a biographical article. Rather terms such as "has no evidence", "is cited to this source" would have meaning. Right and Wrong are such fluid creatures that we actually have courtrooms where they are debated all day and still have no justice ;)
I think they do have meaning on an objective factual level. e.g. If the NYT gets a birthdate wrong and this error is perpetuated, that doesn't make it right however well cited it is.
But that's a detail, not the point. Is there a formulation of what I said (the necessity of immediatism, the lack of the luxury of eventualism) that you'd agree with?
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
I think they do have meaning on an objective factual level. e.g. If the NYT gets a birthdate wrong and this error is perpetuated, that doesn't make it right however well cited it is.
But that's a detail, not the point. Is there a formulation of what I said (the necessity of immediatism, the lack of the luxury of eventualism) that you'd agree with?
Not the person to whom you're replying, but it seems to be to depend on *why* the article is problematic.
Your immediatism/distinction seems to me to apply better in the easier case, which isn't the one you mention with the NYT example, is where it's clearly our fault: we've missummarized the sources or in some way produced a misleading article, which could be corrected by writing a better one from the same or better reliable sources. In those cases, the basic problem with the article is something that would be a problem with any Wikipedia article, and the only difference with BLPs that we need to be quicker and stricter about fixing the problem.
But a particularly problematic case that you seem to be nodding towards are those were we *have*, at least more or less, correctly summarized the available reliable sources, but it's alleged that the sources themselves are wrong, despite no good contravening sources. In those cases, it doesn't seem like a problem with the *encyclopedia* per se, insofar as encyclopedias are just tertiary sources collecting a bunch of stuff from elsewhere. It's rather a problem with the rest of the world not having their story right. And it seems a lot more tricky for us to start deciding which things involving external consensus we're not going to summarize due to our suspicions that they might be wrong, and harmful if so. These are hardly limited to BLPs; I'd say propagating inflammatory misinformation about, say, a recent massacre, is a lot more virulent a falsehood with a greater potential for harm than a lot of the BLP issues that come up. Is there a general solution to that? It seems to be rapidly getting outside our competence to try to figure out, even for cases where misinformation would be harmful, which parts of external consensus are wrong, and how we can determine it.
-Mark