On Oct 28, 2008, at 5:15 PM, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote: You are making no sense, and appear to be willfully misconstruing what I say. On the off-chance that your lunacy has somehow convinced somebody that I have a position anything like what you are describing, I will clarify. What I said was: "I want to take away the right for an editor to revert an edit for the sole reason that we can't verify the person's identity so what they say doesn't count. I want to mandate actually looking at the sources, thinking about the issue, and making a decision based on something other than "The rules say X, period." To this, you said that "It's not whether we can verify who the editor is, it's whether we can verify that they are the subject." I then said "I would ask how "whether we can verify that they are the subject" is in any way a substantively different issue than "whether we can verify their identity,"" The point, which you are bafflingly unwilling to grasp, is that the issue of identity verification should be immaterial to how we respond to a complaint, except inasmuch as common decency necessitates that if someone even appears to be asking us to change our article about them we ought look into what they are asking. In this case, a lengthy complaint about the article was posted to the article page. It was (correctly) removed and then discussed on the talk page, where the discussion turned into sniping about Lanier instead of actually considering the claims and their accuracy. The closest thing I am saying to "the subject of a BLP should be given special privileges" is that I am saying that anything that even looks like the subject complaining about the article should be taken seriously and investigated on the merits of the claims. Even if the complaint is of questionable authenticity and comes in via a channel that is not one of our preferred channels. What went toxically wrong here was that because Lanier lodged his complaints in a way other than our top choice, we ignored him. That was the wrong move. -Phil