Thanks David. Please let me know what they say.
I'd like to reiterate that the information I am assuming he's unhappy with wasn't backed up by sourcing, it was just a crazy rant about his relationship with UT and his book being biased.
K.
----- Original Message ---- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org; Arbitration Committee mailing list arbcom-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2005 6:35:39 AM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] More Seigenthaler fallout
I wrote on wikien-l:
Matt Brown wrote:
Katefan0 wrote:
Mr. Sigenthaler's recent experience has encouraged me to send you
this note. As you know, I have been the subject of some discussion in one of the pages you administer. Some of those comments I consider libelous. I strongly suggest that you, as the party responsible for this article and discussion, and/or Wiki executives take immediate action to purge such false and irresponsible statements, and block such from occurring in the future.
Please forward this to Wiki executives. I look forward to your speedy response.
My belief is that in general we should not remove things from page history so easily.
Seconded. This is an invitation to every POV pusher who doesn't like criticism.
I should emphasise here I don't mean John Siegenthaler - or, without knowledge of the case, the person who wrote to Katefan0. I've dealt with a number of cases of perfectly normal and decent people who understand and respect our mission as an NPOV encyclopedia, but are unhappy at being slandered by conspiracy-obsessed nutters who just won't quit and aren't quite sure what to do about it. Usually we work it out okay with a close watch on the article and (possibly) suitable penalties for the antisocial editor. A recent example is [[User:AI]] on [[David S. Touretzky]] (which AI started as a slander page and has now been NPOVed quite well) and [[Keith Henson]] (which AI didn't start but got heavily to work on).
However, we have *plenty* of the other sort. Examples include [[Sollog]], [[Daniel Brandt]], [[Ashida Kim]], [[John Byrne]] (yep, the famous comics artist), [[Barbara Schwarz]] ... I am *greatly* reluctant to let people bowdlerise their article because they don't like notable and well-documented facts.
Our concern is much more with getting things right than it is to inexpertly second-guess the law. It's also far more within our expertise! And once a case *comes to the community's attention*, the article tends to get watchlisted by skilled and experienced editors who will have familiarised themselves with the subject.
This may require removing particularly bad revisions in extreme cases after due consideration, though that's a lot of tedious work that's easily undone with one new edit re-adding the crap. But IMO, we can't get into a habit of removing negative information on first request just like that.
[cc: to arbcom list for consideration]
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