On 25/07/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
I just got a call from Murdo Macleod from Scotland On Sunday. He wanted to ask about semiprotection, and specifically if there was anything Scottish protected or semiprotected on en:.
I pointed him to [[Category:Semi-protected]]. There was nothing Scottish in semi-protected, but it gave him a good overview of what's contentious - i.e., really famous people with the power to upset lots of people at once (e.g. [[George W. Bush]], [[Tony Blair]]) or obscure areas with overactive partisans (e.g. [[Neuro-linguistic programming]]).
He said he was impressed at how quickly the [[Fred Trueman]] article updated when Trueman died recently; I referred him to the [[Kenneth Lay]] piece from Reuters (how the article changed right after Ken Lay died) as a good overview of how Wikipedia actually works in these cases.
He also asked about libelous material and how we deal with it. I explained how the living bio policy is supposed to work (that someone might be minorly notable enough to get an article, but contentious stuff should only be mentioned if it's directly relevant) and that in extreme cases (e.g. privacy invasion) we could remove stuff entirely from view, but it had to be pretty extreme.
I also showed him [[Portal:Scotland]], he seemed quite impressed by it. (It's a very nice portal page.) I mentioned how we were setting up Wikimedia UK to help further coverage of British-related content in Wikipedia.
I said people looking at contentious stuff should check the history and discussion tabs. I stressed my current soundbite: "We're far from perfect, but we're good enough to be useful."
All this may or may not lead to a story, he needs a Scottish hook to do a story, and there's not really a Scottish semiprotection story to tell. But perhaps he'll see something nice on the portal!
Perhaps he could get a story about the existence of the Scots Wikipedia and the small controversy surrounding it (dialect vs. language). Scots has grown pretty well since it was established and is linked to from quite a few Scots language websites... just a suggestion.