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(a)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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