[WikiEN-l] You really don't get it

[George Herbert]

On 4/20/07, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> People have a absolute right not to have their name googled and find
> that the highest ranking site (or perhaps only internet information on
> them) has been written by a silly slanderous schoolkid, their
> ex-husband's angry girlfriend, or a disgruntled ex-employee or rival out
> to trash them. And often these subtle attacks are on the face reading
> well-referenced and seemingly factual. Never spotted as simple vandalism.

Look around.  There are millions of websites (blogs, home pages,
YouTube videos, etc) out there with libelous material, much of it
blatantly false, out there for anyone to see.

Very few of those have any sort of reasonable feedback mechanism short
of a libel/slander lawsuit.  Some ISPs have a no-attacks policy; most
don't, and those that do often have a nearly impractical hurdle
getting through their abuse department.

We have policies with real teeth about what is OK to have here and
what isn't.  We have people who enforce those policies, vigorously,
once we're notified.  We have people associated with the project
actively looking for them, though I don't presume to suggest that we
actually find enough of it ourselves.  And we have a stable versions
technical upgrade coming sometime.

Again: Wikipedia is not the worst place on the Internet from a
perspective of actually protecting people's rights not to be attacked
or slandered, or at least to get it fixed if they are.  It's arguably
close to the best place on the Internet from those perspectives.

It's maddening to see you argue elsewise.  Look around you.

> If Wikipedia can't reasonable insure that people don't have these rights
> infringed, then it has no business hosting their biographies in the
> first place.

You're assigning people a lot of rights that they don't legally or
socially have.

They *don't* have a right, in the United States at least, of absolute
privacy against any discussion of them.

They don't have a right to sue anyone who runs a website on which
libel is posted, just for having hosted it, prior to being notified of
it.

Your argument isn't "We can't infringe people's rights".  You're using
that language, but it's factually incorrect.

Your argument is, "We can't be mean to non-notable people".

That is not legally true.  It is to some degree morally true.  But we
have to keep that in perspective.  People don't deserve to be abused.
But they don't deserve to hide notable activities from the public, or
from the historical record.

We can destroy the encyclopedia to be nice to people.  That's insane.

We can keep the encyclopedia within the law and existing societal and
internet norms for protecting people against abuse.  And we do.

We can protect them better than YouTube, MySpace, and a million other
sites.  And we do.

We don't have to be perfect.  We're an open content system, and an
encyclopedia, and an internet project.  We're within the norms for
such projects.  We care a lot about this topic, from the amount of
arguing over it that happens.  And that's good.  But it can be taken
too far.

You all, today, are taking it too far.


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