[WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun

[Ray Saintonge]

Bryan Derksen wrote:

>I think the reason is that our one truly fundamental goal is to write a
>good, free encyclopedia, and that while attempting to source everything
>is a good means to that goal if we were to take it to the extreme it
>would actually start to move us farther away from it. If we were to
>actually follow through with the absolute full extent of the
>only-sourced-statements ideal it would devastate Wikipedia's current
>contents and IMO raise such a barrier to editing that new work would
>slow to a crawl. We have to consider these costs and find a compromise
>position that tries to minimize them.
>
In certain measure this ties back to our old argument about whether we 
are "free as in beer" of "free as in speech".  The former is relatively 
simple, even if we haven't yet reached perfection in that; copyright 
policy falls into it.  Free as in speech is more elusive.  The right of 
free speech is not the absolut right to sy anything you damn well please 
without regard to consequences, but if there are to be exceptions to 
that right those exceptions must be explicit.  We cannot knowingly allow 
defamation or lies.  As a private organization we are not confined to 
only those exceptions that are sanctioned by law; we can also disallow 
other kinds of speech.  We are within our legal rights to impose some 
kind of notability criterion, but legislating cluefullness remains an 
impossibility and not an illegality.

We need to constantly remind ourselves about what made this project grow 
into the giant that we now have.  Important as it may be to strive for 
total reliability, that was not the most important factor in our 
phenomenal growth.  Nor has that growth been based on having only 
biographies od "notable" people.  If these individuals are really so 
-unnotable, very few people are likely to read those articles anyway.

Ec