I suspect the crap information inserted into the John Seigenthaler article was part of a general trend of a group of JFK conspiracy theorists who have used Wikipedia as a dumping ground for their more farfetched speculations. I've spend a good chunk of my WP time over the last year cleaning up as much of this stuff as I could possibly stand, and in fact rewriting much of the Lee Harvey Oswald article was my first major WP project.
Even if this has nothing to do with the conspiracy buffs, it is part of a much larger problem, which is that every unsourced text dump by an anon seems to be treated as holy writ and uncritically accepted. While we should apply WP:accept good faith to editors, we should apply a lot more skepticism to unsourced info dumps, the source of many problems involving libel and copyright violations and just good old fashioned inaccuracy. We have a culture of openness and DIYism and all those good things, but I'm not convinced we have a culture of quality control yet. How could any halfway decent editor see a passage like "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven" and not think "Hmmm, something's wrong here, at the very least it is totally unsourced".
Maybe the problem is simply that an article like John Seigenthaler Sr. is too obscure to get a lot of eyes on it. It appears that between the crap insertion and the insertion of a copyvio bio (possibly by Siegenthaler himself?) months later, only one editor edited the article. Perhaps we could just chalk this all up to obscurity, but there are too many of the same type of problems with articles that aren't as obscure that we shouldn't just write this one off as an anomaly.
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Calls for a bs: namespace ;)
Anyways, I think this was a failiure on both sides.
Mr. Seigenthaler for perhaps blowing this a little out of proportion (for a while there it shounded like he wanted wikipedia held legally responsibly).
Wikipedia for not detecting something obviously false after almost a third of a year on what I would imagine could be at least read once every while
On 11/30/05, Rob gamaliel8@yahoo.com wrote:
I suspect the crap information inserted into the John Seigenthaler article was part of a general trend of a group of JFK conspiracy theorists who have used Wikipedia as a dumping ground for their more farfetched speculations. I've spend a good chunk of my WP time over the last year cleaning up as much of this stuff as I could possibly stand, and in fact rewriting much of the Lee Harvey Oswald article was my first major WP project.
Even if this has nothing to do with the conspiracy buffs, it is part of a much larger problem, which is that every unsourced text dump by an anon seems to be treated as holy writ and uncritically accepted. While we should apply WP:accept good faith to editors, we should apply a lot more skepticism to unsourced info dumps, the source of many problems involving libel and copyright violations and just good old fashioned inaccuracy. We have a culture of openness and DIYism and all those good things, but I'm not convinced we have a culture of quality control yet. How could any halfway decent editor see a passage like "For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven" and not think "Hmmm, something's wrong here, at the very least it is totally unsourced".
Maybe the problem is simply that an article like John Seigenthaler Sr. is too obscure to get a lot of eyes on it. It appears that between the crap insertion and the insertion of a copyvio bio (possibly by Siegenthaler himself?) months later, only one editor edited the article. Perhaps we could just chalk this all up to obscurity, but there are too many of the same type of problems with articles that aren't as obscure that we shouldn't just write this one off as an anomaly.
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On Dec 1, 2005, at 6:55 PM, Ilya N. wrote:
Wikipedia for not detecting something obviously false after almost a third of a year on what I would imagine could be at least read once every while
Unlikely - the article was created on 5/26/05, and had only one edit on 5/29/05 before 9/23/05, when it was replaced with an accurate version. It looks like virtually nobody ever looked at the page.
-Phil