On 8/23/06, Prasad J <prasad59(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How would you distinguish honest errors from
malicious vandalism,
especially with reagrd to something like dates? I could edit an
article to reflect that World War 2 ended in 1935, without intending
to do so because of a typographical error? Unless the edit is obvious
vandalism, (like saying World War 2 ended in 2045-which cannot,
reasonably, be termed a typograhical error), it would be difficult to
seperate the vandals from those who make such errors while typing or
as a result of looking up the date from a source that is not correct.
Do we need to?
A huge amount of vandalism on wikipedia is a result of "can I really
edit this?" as evidenced by the high levels of self revert. Because
of this, it is sound policy to warn on the first incident rather than
block. Unfortunately we don't have a good way of closely monitoring
the contribs of a warned user, but thats another matter.
In any case, our primary concern on this matter is to be accurate...
it doesn't matter if the error was induced through an honest mistake,
idle curiosity, or malicious intent. We still must detect and resolve
it.
Unless there is an evident pattern in the editor's behaviour, the only
way to resolve the problem is to fix the error, and go on with life.
Warning a person for making an obvious typo, and blocking him if he
makes a second typo strikes me as an extremist attitude.
Ec