Just because we couldn't have done anything differently doesn't mean he has no right to be upset about it. If anything, incidents like this prove that we really need flagged revisions on the English Wikipedia--libel can actually hurt real people's reputation and feelings, and we need a way to stop it from appearing publicly. On that note, I'll invite anybody who's interested to join the discussion about implementing a trial of flagged revisions on enwp's featured articles--check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Flagged_revisions/Trial. Best regards, --Thomas

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:29 PM, <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote: We could have had version flagging enabled so that only wiki-sausage-makers saw this obvious vandalism and so that it didn't end up spread across the internet, stuck in caches, etc. This kind of crud happens with some regularity, even with some regularity to many of the same subjects. "What more could we do?" isn't a position I think any of you can really support. There are a great many things we could have done: (roughly less impacting to most) We could have automated detection and alerting on certain problem words ('homosexual', 'penis', etc) to reduce the frequency of vandalism staying in days at a time, we could activate flagging (as mentioned), we could semi protect all BLPs, we could full protect all BLPs, we have much looser deletion criteria for BLPs, we could ban BLPs from them from Wikipedia, we could stop open editing, we could shut the site down. We are far from helpless and innocent. We have a duty to the public: It's our responsibility not to be a nuisance. If we are unwilling to mitigate the risks of our approach acceptably eventually the peasants with pitchforks (and legislation…) will do it for us.