[WikiEN-l] Who wins

[Phil Sandifer]

On Apr 21, 2006, at 4:13 AM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Apr 2006 23:30:35 -0700 (PDT), you wrote:
>
>>  Umm... No? What's so bad about it? Wikipedia has an article  
>> saying two
>> blogs contain a sentence "Fred is Gay" and the reader draws the  
>> inference
>> that the owner of those blogs is seriously retarded. Big deal.
>
> Yes, big deal.  Ask the lawyers.
> Guy (JzG)
> -- 

We don't need WP:V to be our sole line of protection against this,  
though, and we certainly don't need to behave stupidly in relation to  
other sources over this.

The problem with libelous crap is not that, prior to Siegenthaler, we  
allowed it. It is that prior to Siegenthaler and continuing to the  
present, we have been insufficiently skilled at catching it and  
fixing it. We know and have always known what libelous crap looks  
like. We do not need to try to make a definition of verifiability  
that a trained monkey could follow - especially not when that  
definition is wrong.

We have always had the policy of not reporting on trivial crap in  
articles. That your hypothetical "Fred is Gay" bloggers insist on its  
content in Wikipedia is neither here nor there. We look at it, we see  
that it is not, in fact, of sufficient widespread interest to be  
worth reporting, we remove it. If they are dicks about it, we ban  
them. The end. We do not need to change policies to say that we can  
remove it - we have always and will always have the right to make any  
changes we want to articles to improve them.

I will say again: The problems we have with libelous materials are  
not problems with our policies - they were fine before, and are  
substantially less fine now than they were a year ago.

-Phil