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