Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
Things that we re-report, summarize, etc in BLP's is sometimes going to hurt people. We've been over this ground before. Not only people who do stupid things (like murder, rape, etc.), but people who are mentioned nationally doing embarrassing things as well.
Our mission is not to protect people from themselves. That is *their* mission. Our mission is to rely on reliable, verifiable sources to tell the public what *is* going on.
Hiding half the world, from the world, does not help our project. It makes us look like censors.
Will Johnson
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WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
Things that we re-report, summarize, etc in BLP's is sometimes going to hurt people. We've been over this ground before. Not only people who do stupid things (like murder, rape, etc.), but people who are mentioned nationally doing embarrassing things as well.
Our mission is not to protect people from themselves. That is *their* mission. Our mission is to rely on reliable, verifiable sources to tell the public what *is* going on.
This entirely misses the point of what I was talking about. I am sorry but I am at a bit of a loss at the moment as to how to explain it to you.
The victim of the bad biography in this case did nothing to deserve the insults that were flung at him by the vandals. I am not suggesting that we hide embarrassing things done by various people, not report honestly on murder cases, etc. All of that has absolutely nothing to do with what we are discussing here.
--Jimbo
On 29/04/2008, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that
that
is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
Things that we re-report, summarize, etc in BLP's is sometimes going
to hurt
people. We've been over this ground before. Not only people who do
stupid
things (like murder, rape, etc.), but people who are
mentioned nationally
doing embarrassing things as well.
Our mission is not to protect people from themselves. That is *their* mission. Our mission is to rely on reliable, verifiable sources to tell the
public
what *is* going on.
This entirely misses the point of what I was talking about. I am sorry but I am at a bit of a loss at the moment as to how to explain it to you.
The victim of the bad biography in this case did nothing to deserve the insults that were flung at him by the vandals. I am not suggesting that we hide embarrassing things done by various people, not report honestly on murder cases, etc. All of that has absolutely nothing to do with what we are discussing here.
--Jimbo
Article is nominated for deletion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Bob_Kinnear
Risker
Jimmy Wales wrote:
The victim of the bad biography in this case did nothing to deserve the insults that were flung at him by the vandals. I am not suggesting that we hide embarrassing things done by various people, not report honestly on murder cases, etc. All of that has absolutely nothing to do with what we are discussing here.
What's the pressing issue here, though? As far as BLPs go, I'd put "juvenile vandalism" pretty far down the list of things to worry about. People who have been accused of serious but unfounded things have a legitimate worry about Wikipedia damaging their reputations by repeating libels or half-truths. It's particularly damaging if the article looks authoritative---well-written, good formatting, footnotes duly inserted, etc... but highly biased and libelous. On the other hand, a union leader being called "a douchebag" by a random person on the internet, with bad grammar and the offending juvenile insult removed a week later, doesn't suffer particularly great harm. Heck, someone temporarily vandalizing [[clinical depression]] with "LOL UR AN EMO FAG" probably has more potential negative real-world effect.
-Mark
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:16 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
[snip]
You're correct that the goal is to be neutral and that neutrality sometimes makes people unhappy.... But neutrality goes beyond being simply factual: having a big high profile article about some trivial gaff that would be soon forgotten without WP's help is not neutrality. Neutrality is more nuanced that the impression people put off when they make the "they screwed up, it's their problem" argument. ... and in this and many many other cases, there really isn't an argument the the subject screwed up and somehow deserves the embarrassment of having the truth told.
In any case, the reason for emphasizing the 'hurting people' is that the classic Wikipedian counter to evidence of grevious error in Wikipedia is something like Mark's "We've got 2 million articles, this is to be expected". Expected or not, it's not acceptable. It would be unacceptable if no one were hurt, but it's doubly so because people can be and are.
... and most importantly, we should consider it unacceptable because this sort of harm is a direct result of Wikipedia policies and procedures, and is most likely completely avoidable without compromising on neutrality.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
and in this and many many other cases, there really isn't an argument the the subject screwed up and somehow deserves the embarrassment of having the truth told.
Yes!
... and most importantly, we should consider it unacceptable because this sort of harm is a direct result of Wikipedia policies and procedures, and is most likely completely avoidable without compromising on neutrality.
I am not sure about "completely avoidable"... though we should try.
The only reason I mention this is that there is another form of invalid "paralysis" thinking which says "We can never solve this problem completely, therefore it is a waste of time to try to improve the situation at all."
This sort of harm is a direct result of Wikipedia policies and procedures, and is most likely *significantly* avoidable without significantly compromising on neutrality, quality, openness, and our other values.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 1:16 PM, WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
[snip]
You're correct that the goal is to be neutral and that neutrality sometimes makes people unhappy.... But neutrality goes beyond being simply factual: having a big high profile article about some trivial gaff that would be soon forgotten without WP's help is not neutrality. Neutrality is more nuanced that the impression people put off when they make the "they screwed up, it's their problem" argument. ... and in this and many many other cases, there really isn't an argument the the subject screwed up and somehow deserves the embarrassment of having the truth told.
But this is again a generic policy; we even have one of those impenetrable bits of jargon for it, [[WP:UNDUE]]. We have flamewars about it all the time, ranging from whose views on global warming are worth including in the main article, to which criticisms of Islam are notable. Sure, with biographies of living people (as well as several other classes of articles, such as those on imminent elections, and maybe even criticisms of Islam) it may be *more important* to follow this policy as promptly as possible than with articles about long-dead people or untimely subjects almost nobody cares about. But that's just a general preference to fix The Articles That Matter More sooner, not some unique way of writing BLPs.
On the union-leader-attack page though, I would agree that some mechanism to deal with repeated obviously-bad reverts from multiple or changing IP addresses would be ideal. I wasted a good bit of time keeping both pro- and con- crap and blogcruft out of [[Erwin McManus]], some page I found on recentchanges patrol about some guy I've never heard of and don't care about at all, but who appears to have a strong following and strong opposition. Posting in the obvious places (some BLP page; Wikiproject Christianity; I forget where else) elicited not much of a response, and protecting the page myself elicited an admonition that I shouldn't have protected a page I was "edit warring" on.
-Mark
2008/4/29 WJhonson@aol.com:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
It is, however, a very accurate approach to describe situations where all we are doing is republishing abuse and insults!
Let's run through these again.
"...is a supreme douchebag" "...is a Class A cock-smoker with a terrible set of plugs" "You're a dickhead ... You sound like a whiny jerk who just loves to have his little media moments" "...eats babies" "...is a self serving jack-off"
It is really a bit misleading to give the impression that being against this sort of tripe is "hiding" things or somehow making us "look like censors".
Of course we don't want to conceal things or to pander to people who get upset because we fail to burnish their haloes... but this isn't anywhere near one of those cases. This is us acting as a carrier for abuse, plain and simple gutter abuse, and not doing anything about it - nor, indeed, did we even seem to *notice* it in any organised sense at the time.
Andrew Gray wrote:
Of course we don't want to conceal things or to pander to people who get upset because we fail to burnish their haloes... but this isn't anywhere near one of those cases. This is us acting as a carrier for abuse, plain and simple gutter abuse, and not doing anything about it
- nor, indeed, did we even seem to *notice* it in any organised sense
at the time.
Yes, and I think this last point is an important one. In the edit history there are some bot-reversions which are good but which might have the unfortunate side effect of no humans noticing that there was a problem.
There is an editor who describes himself as a newbie on his user page and who seems to have accidentally restored the vandalism. Not good, but you know, things like that are bound to happen.
But overall I do not have the sense that any significant *blame* could be placed on anyone in particular (other than the vandals, but they are not participating in our dialog here). This is the natural workings of the system as we have built it to date.
Will Johnson wrote:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
Things that we re-report, summarize, etc in BLP's is sometimes going to hurt people... Our mission is not to protect people from themselves... Our mission is to rely on reliable, verifiable sources to tell the public what *is* going on.
But merely relying on "reliable, verifiable sources" is a simplistic approach, too.
There is unquestionably a huge tension between "don't hurt people" and several of our other core policies. But if there's one thing we've learned (or should have learned) lately, it's that blind, mechanical reliance on "core policies" is not a surefire approach to encyclopedic perfection. We're *always* going to have to actually *think* about the difficult, sensitive edge cases -- and there are always going to be plenty of them.
Here's an example I encountered today: [[Natascha Kampusch]], a woman to whom the world has dealt a particularly difficult hand. One would hope that Wikipedia would play absolutely no part in making her recovery from her ordeal any more difficult. But precisely because her case is so sensational, it's naturally a magnet for all sorts of attention seekers and conspiracy theorists. Some of them manage to get their bizarre allegations written up in "reliable, verifiable sources", whereupon they're fodder for a Wikipedia article, whether they belong there or not. I've removed two such allegations already, and then there's this strange claim:
...on May 25, 2007, her mother was officially charged and ordered to stand trial for aiding in the abduction to cover up sexual abuse. [10]
It's sourced to this article in the (eminently reliable, in my experience) Scotsman:
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/Eightyear-kidnap-girls-mother-is.3289215...
But if you read the article, you discover that the suit was brought not so much to charge Natascha's mother but to "clear the name" of an ex-judge whose earlier allegations along these lines had been rejected.
It's an unholy mess, which I imagine the Austrian courts have had an inordinately difficult time trying to sort out, and which Wikipedia is obviously utterly helpless at rendering a proper judgement on. So we have to ask ourselves: do we want to err on the side of citing reliable sources, or of not furthering damaging allegations which might or might not ever be shown to have any substance? In this case, it seems to me that the answer is unquestionably the latter, and I've just edited the article to say
...there have been (unsubstantiated) allegations that Natascha's mother was somehow involved in the abduction or its cover-up. [10]
(I'd prefer to remove mention of this issue entirely, but one step at a time.)
You may think Jimbo's an old softie for harping on this "don't hurt people" mantra; you may think it's an impossibly subjective goal and that our only hope is to fall back instead on our nice, objectively-applied "policies", or on the excuse that truth is an absolute defense against anything. But by doing the latter, we do hurt people, and it's within our power not to.
2008/4/29 WJhonson@aol.com:
Saying that things in BLPs "hurts people" only furthers the idea that that is what we're avoiding. It's a simplistic approach to a complex issue.
Things that we re-report, summarize, etc in BLP's is sometimes going to hurt people. We've been over this ground before. Not only people who do stupid things (like murder, rape, etc.), but people who are mentioned nationally doing embarrassing things as well.
Our mission is not to protect people from themselves. That is *their* mission. Our mission is to rely on reliable, verifiable sources to tell the public what *is* going on.
Hiding half the world, from the world, does not help our project. It makes us look like censors.
We're censors. That is a necessary part of writing an encyclopedia. Yes, we've been over this ground before, and every single time we come down to this: we are not here to make things worse. We are not here to push out trash. We are not here to rub our own stupidity into the wounds caused by somebody else's.