[WikiEN-l] defused timebomb

[Andrew Gray]

On 21/01/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> I don't know how long the list was but being a "list" it should be
> enough if there are sources on the listed pages themselves.  Nobody puts
> sources on the index or Table of Contents of a book, because the sources
> would already be at more appropriate places.

With a book, we can reliably know that there are sources elsewhere. To
keep an article like this reliable, we either need to source it on
that page or else keep checking the section saying "In 1972, she was
involved in a car accident which left two dead." is still there on
another page...

"Sources on the other page" is fine enough, but perhaps a more
practical use of this system would be to have *categories*, not a
list; if the original article has the content change, they zap the cat
as well, and they disappear from our "list". Plus we don't need to
clutter it with sources.

(As an aside - our users tend to treat categories as a rather
simplistic list, anyway, so the difference ought to be limited...)

> The "huge" potential for libel is a product of your imagination.  I'm
> not saying that there is none at all, but it is certainly much less than
> what you imagine.  In any event, other ways of fixing the article would
> also have eliminated that problem.  I don't know when the page was
> started but its talk page has been there four months; there was no urgency.

Stupid things have been going on for a long time, sure. It doesn't
mean we shouldn't respond to them swiftly and cleanly when we discover
them.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk