[WikiEN-l] Human dignity

[Erik Moeller]

On 7/16/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at vyznev.net> wrote:
> Bryan Derksen wrote:
> >
> > Why is this not a good thing? Our articles are NPOV and verifiable, and
> > easily corrected should errors in them be found. What would be a better
> > site to have as the #1 hit?
>
> That's a good point.  Given that we don't, currently, provide any
> information on Brian Peppers, I'm glad, for the sake of human dignity,
> that Snopes does

Indeed, this is a very powerful moral argument on which I'd
particularly like to hear Jimmy's thoughts: Isn't a neutral summary
better than the rubbish of fark.com and so forth? At least in cases
where the damage is already done? (If anything, we've pushed the meme
further by arguing endlessly about it.)

My immediate response would be: Yes, if we permanently semi-protect
it. Otherwise Wikipedia will in fact be used _like_ fark.com or
YTTMAND or whatever its name is, and as a visitor, there will be a
good chance that the article will have been recently abused the moment
you look at it.

In the future this would be a candidate for what I call "quality
protection", where you only ever get to see the latest "stable
version". [*] This is not something that I ever would like to see for
_all_ articles, but for the very same subset which are currently
permanently semi-protected, effectively further weakening protection
(but possibly slightly enlarging the subset).

Erik

[*] I'm not convinced that the concept of a "stable version" as
currently debated makes sense for anything but very basic assertions
about quality, though it would already be a great leap forward
(*cough*) from not distinguishing obvious vandalism from non-vandalism
at all.