From: Geoff Burling llywrch@agora.rdrop.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The Church of Scientology is discovered to have discovered Wikipedia! To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: Pine.LNX.4.33.0407142137290.551-100000@joan.burling.com Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
I recently told a reporter that representatives of the Chinese government are welcome to edit zh.wikipedia.org if they like. I think we can extend the same courtesy to representatives of the Church of Scientology.
I find this quite alarming. At the existing policy page [[Wikipedia:Auto-biography]] we find "editing an article about yourself or your organization is also generally considered improper and best avoided." Should we announce a change of policy now?
Zero.
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Jimbo's example is a good one. Attempts by the Chinese government to edit Wikipedia articles on China would be highly counter-productive and embarrassing for many of the same reasons that apply to an individual user.
Perhaps Scientology is willing to accept the consequences.
Fred
From: zero 0000 nought_0000@yahoo.com Reply-To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 05:46:59 -0700 (PDT) To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] The Church of Scientology is discovered to have discovered Wikipedia!
I find this quite alarming. At the existing policy page [[Wikipedia:Auto-biography]] we find "editing an article about yourself or your organization is also generally considered improper and best avoided." Should we announce a change of policy now?
Zero.
Hi!
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 07:48:05 -0600, Fred Bauder wrote:
Attempts by the Chinese government to edit Wikipedia articles on China would be highly counter-productive and embarrassing for many of the same reasons that apply to an individual user.
Not too sure about that - I am sure that many articles about China could be edited in a quite NPOV way even by the Chinese government. However, articles about current Chinese politics would not be among these articles.
Same way, CoS should maybe not edit articles about the CoS, because their way of dealing with anything that does not agree with their point of view is quite notorious, and, let me put this carefully, does not exactly seem to agree well with the principle of NPOV.
The comparison with say, Roman Catholics, does not hold too much water, because let's face it, there are quite a few Catholics who do not necessarily agree with everything that comes from Rome; something that is said not to be particularly good if you are a member of CoS. (Or not even a member, for that matter.) Also, Rome has stopped burning their critics for quite a while now, too.
Alex