And I Phil, will continue to give a good faith belief that previous editors have edited conscientiously. The burden of disproof is more on the shoulders of new untested editors, than it is on the community at-large.
I'm not going to call your opposite position immoral however. We differ in our approaches. That's all.
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Will Johnson wrote:
And I... will continue to give a good faith belief that previous editors have edited conscientiously.
Most of the extant text in Wikipedia was edited by conscientious editors. But there are plenty of exceptions, sometimes rather startling.
I wouldn't be black-and-white about any of this. New, untested editors deserve an assumption of good faith, too.
It's fine to be tentatively suspicious when an anonymous editor commenting on a BLP claims to be the subject of the BLP -- it's true, he might not be. But by the same token, one should also be tentatively suspicious that any given bit of data currently in Wikipedia might be wrong. (We remind our readers to be guardedly suspicious before blindly accepting anything that's written in Wikipedia as fact -- and we ought to maintain that suspicion, too.)
The burden of disproof is more on the shoulders of new untested editors, than it is on the community at-large.
But remember: the *real* burden of proof/disproof is on the editor who actually makes a change, not on the new, untested editor who might have been merely the first person to point out that the change was necessary.