Jean-Baptiste wrote:
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.
It's important to be clear here. There is no 'special liability regime' that protects any publisher, editor, or author from charges of liability. The doctrine is clear: if you write something or publish something about someone that is *perceived as libelous* that person can sue you. And such suits occur all the time (especially in the UK). God grant it won't happen to WP, but it is important to consider that it could (and, in some cases, perhaps should).
There is a more general consideration, tho: repeated notices in the *trusted* print press to the effect that WP is not trustworthy will drive people away. WP's reputation is on the line. So WP has both good legal and practical reasons to institute some sort of (let me just say it) formal editorial control over quality.
This, if I understand, is just what is being discussed now.
Best,
Marshall Poe The Atlantic Monthly www.memorywiki.org
On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Poe, Marshall wrote:
There is a more general consideration, tho: repeated notices in the *trusted* print press to the effect that WP is not trustworthy will drive people away. WP's reputation is on the line. So WP has both good legal and practical reasons to institute some sort of (let me just say it) formal editorial control over quality.
<cough> It isn't as though everyone is tiptoeing around that phrase.
There are solutions to improving WP's quality - particularly the quality of content seen by 99% of our readers and all of our serious mirrors - that are at once more effective and less controversial than 'formal editorial control'.
SJ
Poe, Marshall wrote:
There is a more general consideration, tho: repeated notices in the *trusted* print press to the effect that WP is not trustworthy will drive people away. WP's reputation is on the line. So WP has both good legal and practical reasons to institute some sort of (let me just say it) formal editorial control over quality.
This is part of why I say we've peaked too early and will be able to work much better on the encyclopedia when we're not flavour of the month and our editors aren't being spooked by our current high rating. I haven't seen a great many proposals to "remedy" this that won't risk severely damaging the community that has produced what we have so far. (It's one of the reasons we're explicitly not doing anything with the ratings until we know what they look like.)
If the "trusted" print press turn away people who believe anything they see on the internet, I suspect that would actually be better for us than claiming we absolutely have to strangle the freedom that produced what we have so far.
- d.
On 12/1/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
If the "trusted" print press turn away people who believe anything they see on the internet, I suspect that would actually be better for us than claiming we absolutely have to strangle the freedom that produced what we have so far.
We should certainly not strangle that freedom. But I'm not worried about people being 'turned away' from WP because of bad press. I'm worried about the real damage that may be done to people due to bad content. As a community, we should be far more concerned about this than about our own image.
++SJ
SJ wrote:
We should certainly not strangle that freedom. But I'm not worried about people being 'turned away' from WP because of bad press. I'm worried about the real damage that may be done to people due to bad content. As a community, we should be far more concerned about this than about our own image.
That's true, but at the moment Wikipedia has not yet instituted a system by which we can say that we are even reasonably sure that a particular revision of a particular article is accurate. This has been long-planned, but not operative. In the meantime, people need to read Wikipedia with a large grain of a salt---it is great for finding out information, but any information that is important should be double-checked (this is true of any sources, but especially true of ones in flux). Basically, as David Gerard has mentioned, we've peaked too early---Wikipedia is still in beta, working out how to deal with these issues, so should be treated appropriately.
Perhaps we should make the disclaimers more prominent? There are plenty of possible ways people could be damaged other than libel---for example, someone could rely on a wholly made-up bit of medical advice.
-Mark
On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, Delirium wrote:
Perhaps we should make the disclaimers more prominent? There are plenty of possible ways people could be damaged other than libel---for example, someone could rely on a wholly made-up bit of medical advice.
Let us by all means make disclaimers more prominent. It is too late for the project not to be successful -- from a position of strength the community can afford to be more self-critical, and even to start generating our own harsh statistics on how [in]accurate or [un]referenced our content is.
More suited to wikipedia-l, since we're talking about that; re-adding it to the Cc: list.
--SJ
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org