I picked up an OTRS ticket this evening to find this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chris_Massey&diff=124008591&am... 117178455
Unreverted, disgusting and depraved libel against an NFL player that had sat for nearly a month before someone reported it to us. Absolutely stupefying. How long would it have stayed there if we hadn¹t been notified? What if instead of telling us, the person had sent an e-mail straight to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch? I can see the AP headlines now... ³WIKIPEDIA FALSELY ACCUSES NFL PLAYER OF BEING PORN STAR.²
If we can¹t even keep professional football player biographies from being blatantly vandalized, how can we possibly hope to protect the ordinary, average Joe who happens to wind up with a page on Wikipedia for being caught up in someone else¹s scandal? Who are we kidding, anyway?
I believe that we should immediately make all articles about living people into ³stable versions,² editable only by administrators based on talk page consensus, so that we have at least some degree of control over what we say about people. We are doing way, way too much damage, and it has to stop, and stop now, before we really cause permanent harm to someone.
As one of the Internet¹s top-10 Web sites, we have a moral and ethical responsibility to the people and topics we write about. We cannot continue to let anyone say anything they want, pending reversion because as this case makes clear, that reversion might not come for weeks or months, if ever.
-Travis Mason-Bushman
I believe that we should immediately make all articles about living people into ³stable versions,² editable only by administrators based on talk page consensus, so that we have at least some degree of control over what we say about people. We are doing way, way too much damage, and it has to stop, and stop now, before we really cause permanent harm to someone.
Are there less radical solutions that we have not tried out yet? Remember, we have MediaWiki:Sitenotice at our disposal to focus the attention of all registered users. We could have a global call to sign up for BLP patrol on Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living_people -- make sure that hundreds of people look at the logs at least once per day.
I would not rule out more rigid application of semi-protection until we have revision tagging, but it seems like a poorly scalable solution. The problem certainly extends beyond BLPs to articles about high schools and universities, where teachers and professors are often targeted by drive-by idiots.
Are there less radical solutions that we have not tried out yet? Remember, we have MediaWiki:Sitenotice at our disposal to focus the attention of all registered users. We could have a global call to sign up for BLP patrol on Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Living_people -- make sure that hundreds of people look at the logs at least once per day.
I would not rule out more rigid application of semi-protection until we have revision tagging, but it seems like a poorly scalable solution. The problem certainly extends beyond BLPs to articles about high schools and universities, where teachers and professors are often targeted by drive-by idiots.
Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
Who are we kidding, anyway?
Let's be honest - Wikipedians are only kidding themselves. You are dealing with systematic problems for which there is no easy fix. Probably no fix at all. Oh, sure, one could suspend editing on potential BLP articles, and make them editable only by sysops or established users. but then Wikipedia would cease to be Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit.
Wikipedia critics have been pointing this out ever since the Seigenthaler incident. Before that, actually. Good luck fixing the problem. You'll need it.
The problem is that recentchanges only goes back for certain amount of time. If something falls of the list without being checked, though luck. We need some system to inform people an edit hasn't been checked and is about to fall off the radar.
Mgm
On 4/19/07, Blu Aardvark jewbowales@wikipedia-lol.cjb.net wrote:
Travis Mason-Bushman wrote:
Who are we kidding, anyway?
Let's be honest - Wikipedians are only kidding themselves. You are dealing with systematic problems for which there is no easy fix. Probably no fix at all. Oh, sure, one could suspend editing on potential BLP articles, and make them editable only by sysops or established users. but then Wikipedia would cease to be Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit.
Wikipedia critics have been pointing this out ever since the Seigenthaler incident. Before that, actually. Good luck fixing the problem. You'll need it.
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