Jimmy Wales wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
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.
Anthony, I'm not normally one to state harsh opinions. But frankly, if you don't find those errors to be blindingly obvious, you need to find another hobby. Writing an encyclopedia is quite frankly beyond you.
I have to admit I probably wouldn't have flagged these as out of the ordinary either. There are hundreds of JFK conspiracy theories, many involving unlikely-seeming people, and there are many USians who have lived in the Soviet Union for long periods, people working at the embassy for example. WP has a long tradition of "strange but true" material, as witness [[crushing by elephant]] and the whole exploding animals series, so strangeness alone does not trigger many alarms.
RC patrol sometimes seems a little like a checkpoint in Iraq; the volume of oncoming traffic is such that you only get a few seconds to assess each edit as "plausible" or "bogus", and either pull the trigger or let it pass. Just the other day somebody reverted as vandalism an anon's mention of a proposal for a maglev train from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. But I remembered reading about it in the paper, and a moment of Googling turned up all the details. I only noticed this deletion because the article happened to be on my watchlist because I had added a picture to it once.
If you really want to keep the vandals and pranksters from getting through, you either need more volunteers on patrol (Shinseki says 300,000 at least :-) ), or use them more efficiently, or cut down on the inflow somehow.
Stan