[Foundation-l] Robert Mugabe's daughter - news story originating from Wikipedia?

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 3/29/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> If a minister is going to make a statement before parliament based on
> reading something on Wikipedia, that's his problem, not ours.
> Wikipedia articles sometimes contain errors, we, of course, work to
> reduce them as much as possible, but we'll never eliminate them
> completely. If this minor diplomatic incident really was a result of
> the Wikipedia article, then the blame falls squarely on the minister
> in question, nowhere else.

IMHO, "it's your fault for believing us", while true, is not fair or
realistic as our only response to such issues.

"Your honor, I should not be convinced of murder simply because he
failed to get out of the way of the stabs I made with my knife." ...
see... it just doesn't fly. :)

The responsibility to avoid harm is shared. The public should try to
avoid harm by being skeptical about what they receive, and we should
try to avoid harm by being as careful as we can within our structure
to be good about what we transmit.

I, and many others with reasonably long tenures by our standards,
believe we have a number of substantial quality problems which we are
undertaking insufficient efforts to address.

I don't have any magic solutions, but I can't sit by and dismiss such
concerns by throwing the entire responsibility on our users.