Mark wrote:
And in this case, I don't see how ethical issues enter into it at all.
Like this: deciding what you are going to say and what you aren't going to say is on some level an ethical or moral decision. Similarly, deciding what you are going publish and what you aren't going to publish is an ethical or moral decision. Now, we can deny this, but denial doesn't make it so. In the case of the offended party in USAToday, WP (whoever that is) facilitated the publication of arguably libelous statements. Those statements harmed that individual. I can't speak for you, but this makes me uncomfortable.
If the biography is inaccurate, it should be edited, and in fact anyone
(including the
offended person) can do so. The ability to sue whoever first made it
inaccurate is
superfluous.
Maybe, but as someone said earlier, what if he hadn't found the article? What if it had seriously damaged his reputation? What if this damage extended to his ability to make a living and support his family? The point about slander and libel is that the damage it does is very hard to undo. Would correcting the article get this man his reputation back? I doubt it.
The basic problem here is that no one stands behind the factual claims on Wikipedia--no publishers, no editors, no authors, just some amorphous and constantly changing "community." I should add that I say this as a *big fan* of WP. It worries me.
Best,
Marshall Poe The Atlantic Monthly www.memorywiki.org
Legal liability (which we would be foolish not to minimize) and doing what is responsible and considerate are two different things. For one thing we need some kind of hot line (not the overloaded Help-l) for collecting and dealing with this sort of complaint. Once alerted, we could do a fact check and delete material that is unsourced, or phony- sourced. This should not require a lot of rigamarole, after all, it is a part of regular editing to remove information that can't be verified.
Fred
On Nov 30, 2005, at 11:35 AM, Poe, Marshall wrote:
Mark wrote:
And in this case, I don't see how ethical issues enter into it at all.
Like this: deciding what you are going to say and what you aren't going to say is on some level an ethical or moral decision. Similarly, deciding what you are going publish and what you aren't going to publish is an ethical or moral decision. Now, we can deny this, but denial doesn't make it so. In the case of the offended party in USAToday, WP (whoever that is) facilitated the publication of arguably libelous statements. Those statements harmed that individual. I can't speak for you, but this makes me uncomfortable.
If the biography is inaccurate, it should be edited, and in fact anyone
(including the
offended person) can do so. The ability to sue whoever first made it
inaccurate is
superfluous.
Maybe, but as someone said earlier, what if he hadn't found the article? What if it had seriously damaged his reputation? What if this damage extended to his ability to make a living and support his family? The point about slander and libel is that the damage it does is very hard to undo. Would correcting the article get this man his reputation back? I doubt it.
The basic problem here is that no one stands behind the factual claims on Wikipedia--no publishers, no editors, no authors, just some amorphous and constantly changing "community." I should add that I say this as a *big fan* of WP. It worries me.
Best,
Marshall Poe The Atlantic Monthly www.memorywiki.org
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Poe, Marshall wrote:
Mark wrote:
And in this case, I don't see how ethical issues enter into it at all.
Like this: deciding what you are going to say and what you aren't going to say is on some level an ethical or moral decision. Similarly, deciding what you are going publish and what you aren't going to publish is an ethical or moral decision.
The problem with this view is that Wikipedia by nature cannot "decide" what to publish---we "publish" anything that anyone posts, automatically and without review, because that is how wikis work. What we *continue* to publish is the result of the consensus of editors.
I don't, in general, see a problem with this. If something is incorrect in any way, it should be corrected or removed (whether it is libelous or not is irrelevant---non-libelous misinformation has no place either). The "what if [x]" scenarios seem pretty far-fetched.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
I don't, in general, see a problem with this. If something is incorrect in any way, it should be corrected or removed (whether it is libelous or not is irrelevant---non-libelous misinformation has no place either).
I should add that, from both an ethical and legal perspective, this is pretty much exactly how all other publicly-editable forums works. If someone posts a libelous message on an AOL message board, or in a livejournal, or anywhere else, it will be removed by the service provider upon complaint, but if nobody complains, there is no editorial mechanism that vets such messages and proactively removes them. Wikipedia is much the same---we just make the process easier by letting you go in and remove the offending message yourself rather than forcing you to file a formal complaint.
Now in the future we do want to start marking articles with some indication of how much they've been vetted, so it will be easier to figure out whether an article's status is more like "nobody has even looked at this except the person who posted it, and it may well be completely made-up" to "a few hundred trusted editors have looked at this and believe it is, to the best of our knowledge, accurate, so there is a pretty good chance it is at least mostly accurate".
-Mark
On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Delirium wrote:
Delirium wrote:
I don't, in general, see a problem with this. If something is incorrect in any way, it should be corrected or removed (whether it is libelous or not is irrelevant---non-libelous misinformation has no place either).
I should add that, from both an ethical and legal perspective, this is pretty much exactly how all other publicly-editable forums works. If someone posts a libelous message on an AOL message board, or in a livejournal, or anywhere
WHAT other publicly-editable forums? I don't know of any at the level of group-authorship of quotes, sentences, paragraphs, and essays.
Wikipedia has developed and propagated an elaborate and nuanced style guide -- from the detailed external link policy down to the popularization of the term "disambiguation" -- one of its greatest accomplishments. This is what helps thousands of unrelated people to work together to maintain a high apparent standard of quality and consistency.
WP also implicitly has an apparent editorial standard, as there is no single name or person or author associated with an article -- not even a list of names, if you just read the main article page and don't know which magic buttons to press; other mediawiki instances (wikitravel) are better about this. No forum, newsgroup, etc I can think of has ever given off that same impression.
--SJ
Actually I don't really see the difference with a classical newspaper. They can very well damage reputations... and actually they do ! But just like freedom of the press, freedom of speech is more important than individuals and Laws allow special liability regimes for both the press and wikipedia.
Poe, Marshall wrote:
Mark wrote:
And in this case, I don't see how ethical issues enter into it at all.
Like this: deciding what you are going to say and what you aren't going to say is on some level an ethical or moral decision. Similarly, deciding what you are going publish and what you aren't going to publish is an ethical or moral decision. Now, we can deny this, but denial doesn't make it so. In the case of the offended party in USAToday, WP (whoever that is) facilitated the publication of arguably libelous statements. Those statements harmed that individual. I can't speak for you, but this makes me uncomfortable.
If the biography is inaccurate, it should be edited, and in fact anyone
(including the
offended person) can do so. The ability to sue whoever first made it
inaccurate is
superfluous.
Maybe, but as someone said earlier, what if he hadn't found the article? What if it had seriously damaged his reputation? What if this damage extended to his ability to make a living and support his family? The point about slander and libel is that the damage it does is very hard to undo. Would correcting the article get this man his reputation back? I doubt it.
The basic problem here is that no one stands behind the factual claims on Wikipedia--no publishers, no editors, no authors, just some amorphous and constantly changing "community." I should add that I say this as a *big fan* of WP. It worries me.
Best,
Marshall Poe The Atlantic Monthly www.memorywiki.org
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