On 12/16/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
I don't know if it contained any references or not, but it certainly could have, just not references for every single fact.
If you don't know if it contained references or not (it didn't, it was just a short series of spectacularly wrong fabrications), then why do you feel qualified to say that "the mistakes were subtle enough to not be obvious."
If the mistakes were obvious, the edit patroller who edited the article would have caught them.
I also read the USA Today article, and the paragraphs that were quoted were not obvious mistakes. "John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960's. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven." "John Seigenthaler moved to the Soviet Union in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984," Wikipedia said. "He started one of the country's largest public relations firms shortly thereafter."
None of those mistakes are obvious. Now maybe there were others which were more glaring and Seigenthaler just decided not to mention them. But I doubt it.
But this proposal was about "basic quality standards", standards which the Seigenthaler article apparently met (I haven't actually seen it, I'm going by the statements of you, Seigenthaler, and others, here).
The Seigenthaler article didn't pass _any_ basic quality standards.
--Jimbo
The original post said this: "Note that I didn't check whether the content was *accurate*, merely whether it was organised, formatted etc in accordance with Wikipedia standards."
The proposal was specifically *not* about accuracy.
Anthony