[WikiEN-l] Jimmy Wales should reconsider

[George Herbert]

On 4/20/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 4/21/07, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 4/20/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Let's describe this "risk of attacks" to an "open source project" in
> > > more realistic terms: real harm done to real people on a daily basis.
> > > This isn't a bit of code that we can assign a "no warrantees"
> > > disclaimer on.  We have to take the damage very seriously.
> >
> > And Linus Torvalds doesn't?  A vulnerabilty snuck into Linux today
> > would potentially affect half the servers on the Internet.  A
> > vulnerability snuck into Apache would affect a vast majority of the
> > websites on the Internet.  MySQL and PostgreSQL?  Perl?  Billions of
> > dollars are at stake with those.  Not being personally responsible for
> > the goof wouldn't make the horrific consequences go away.
> >
>
> Quite.  But look what the lkml is doing about it.  Compared to them,
> we're still *literally* doing the equivalent of letting anybody commit
> to the main release tree and them umming-and-ahing about whether we'll
> take bug reports seriously and, you know, actually remove components
> that are causing damage.

We're not that bad.  And a lot of that will get reduced with Stable
Versions (taking commit rights away from most people, in software
version control terms).

The problem is that we can only go so far to separate biographies out
and treat them differently.  We can't do a complete technical solution
- even some sort of biography flag could be missed or undone or
subverted, and there's nothing keeping someone from putting "Mister
Skinner, the school's principal, is gay and sleeps with his male
students" on a School article, or in a town's article, etc.  That
would be just as googleable as a bio on Leonard Skinner (example from
The Simpsons, hopefully there's no real school principal who will take
offense at this example...).

We can ban anon contributors, and make getting accounts harder.  But
that will cut down on contributions, and most contributions aren't
vandalism, even anon contributions.

We can implement stable versions.  That takes "Commit" away from the
teeming masses.

We can continue to care about the problem and pay attention to it.

But we can't make it go away.  And even if we could, it wouldn't solve
the MySpace/YouTube/Blogosphere problems people have with libel and
online attacks.

Are we a worse component of the problem than everyone else?  No.  Are
we handling it more or less responsibly than everyone else?  More.

Case closed.  We're ok.  Not happy-no-problem ok - it's legitimately
an issue.  But we don't need to tear the project apart over it.



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