On Dec 12, 2007 11:08 AM, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Anthony wikimail@inbox.org:
We're talking about a website with about as many visitors as Myspace. Imagine if Myspace had a bunch of volunteers deciding how to handle stalkers and other criminals who use its website. Imagine the CEO of Myspace was talking about the problem with some of these volunteers on a "private" Wikia mailing list. Imagine if Myspace had volunteer sleuths ban people based on evidence that they refused to reveal. Imagine if Myspace had public trials published on their website whenever they wanted to ban someone. Wikipedia needs to grow up.
I don't see whats so bad about "public trials"- transparency is a good thing.
It's not just that it's public. It's that it's virtually uncontrolled as to what nonsense people can post about others on it. It's that the entire transcript (of virtually everything, from the evidence gathering through the questioning through the deliberations through the decision) is made public on the web, on a page which shows up very highly in the search engines, released under a free license which others are encouraged to mirror. It's that much of it is incorrect and/or misleading and/or libelous. I think it's pretty clearly bad. But my comment was to imagine if Myspace did it. There's a tendency to think of Wikipedia like an MMORPG, which I think blinds us to some extent from how obviously bad some of the policies are.
The rest I'm somewhat inclined to agree with, but the liability concern for the Foundation if it does this sort of thing is serious. This would need to be very carefully thought out.
What exactly is the liability concern? The idea that the WMF is somehow escaping liability by running its website in a way completely different from every other major website doesn't strike me as logical.
And it's even more clearly unethical. I'm reminded of the situation where a group of EMTs let someone drown because they were afraid of the liability they'd incur if they had tried to save him. A more extreme case? I guess. I don't think anyone has died as a direct result of Wikipedia yet. But that's what this line of reasoning reminds me of.