On 10/2/06, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You're right, we can't stop bad people from being bad, but that
doesn't mean that we can't keep employ measures to encourage the
honest people to stay honest.
Or are you also opposed to doors that lock? ... with the exception of
high security doors, a locked door actually does fairly little to
prevent a determined attacker from getting inside, and yet locked
doors have been demonstrated over and over again to be effective.
Or another way of looking at it: One of the more clearly stated
arguments against us running advertising on Wikipedia ourselves is the
potential creation of bias, or at least the creation of the appearance
of bias. It strikes me as odd that people will scream so loudly
against the introduction of advertising which would bring us lots of
useful money without a definite introduction of bias, and yet folks
are not willing to take maximal measures against the abuse of
Wikipedia as an astroturfed advertising medium... when the latter does
create a clear bias in our content.
Sorry if I *do* contradict you. You are one of the most reasonable
people on wikipedia, so I would hope that you would take my
contradiction of what you said above in the same spirit. I wish to
reason with the unreasonable statements in the paragraph above.
Advertisements are *not* useful money. They detract from our mission,
and the value that is added to our content by people who do not feel
advertisements are useful. I *will* argue the point if needed. But I
think I have argued that already in another place.
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Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]