[WikiEN-l] I despair

[Travis Mason-Bushman]

On 4/15/07 11:25 AM, "Jeff Raymond"
<jeff.raymond at internationalhouseofbacon.com> wrote:

> Common decency is an entirely fluid concept from person to person,
> though.  You adn I don't disagree with the intent in this case, but some
> find it harmful on a utilitarian scale.

"Some find it harmful" - did you lift that straight out of [[Wikipedia:
Avoid weasel words]]? "Some" might "find it harmful" that we require
reliable sourcing for anything at all, but we ignore them because we're an
encyclopedia, not a blog.

As an encyclopedia that is one of the Internet's top-10 Web sites, we can no
longer ignore the fact that what we write in the encyclopedia can have a
real-world impact - by republicizing old, completely non-notable and
discredited allegations, by bringing out and permanently recording ancient
family squabbles for all to see, by having biographies which are nothing but
thinly-veiled attack pages and by repeatedly being the vehicle for
disgusting libels which can end up being published by us for months without
being discovered.

Jeff, I can't help but think that if you were a member of the OTRS team and
had to deal with the same things we have to read with on a day-to-day basis,
your attitude would change overnight. We, as an editing community, still do
a very poor job making sure that Wikipedia isn't a libel-and-attack vector.
Human decency is one of the things that requires we change that.

-Travis Mason-Bushman