[WikiEN-l] Jimmy Wales should reconsider

[George Herbert]

On 4/20/07, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I consider our current attitude to the biographies of living persons to
> be positively immoral. We know people are being adversely affected,
> libeled and harassed. We know people are having to check their articles
> daily because of the danger of malicious attacks. And yet we hide behind
> the belief that we are legally untouchable and we refuse to take any
> real steps to reduce the harm, on the basis that 'it isn't how we do
> things', it might upset our users, or it might inadvertently take out a
> precious article on a webcomic as collateral. Well, the collateral to
> real people, in the real world, is now unacceptable.

I strongly disagree that we refuse to take any real steps to reduce
the harm.  There are a lot of good people who watch for bio article
changes.  We have additional steps and procedure and policy clearly
defined for detection and handling of bio article problems.

We are an encyclopedia, and an open source content project.  Our
objective, as a project, is to create and host content.  That includes
biographies of people who are alive.

Any open source project, content or code or whatever, is subject to or
at risk of attacks.  This is a fact of life.

After all the intensive efforts to set and maintain and enforce BLP
policies, no outsider can reasonably claim we aren't trying.

No insider is going to claim we're succeeding perfectly, either.

We can't be perfect.  To attain our project's goals, we have to
balance technology, people's time, and policies.  Lacking "approved
version" code, we're doing a pretty good approximation of optimally
given what our project stands for and the resource constraints.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com