[WikiEN-l] David is on Channel 4 tonight re MS issue

[Daniel R. Tobias]

On 28 Jan 2007 at 01:40, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> I think that we need to establish a right of defence or rebuttal (or 
> whatever we want to call it).  This would allow anyone who is directly 
> affected by the article a place to defend his point of view.  This could 
> probably be done in a template that is linked from the page in 
> question.  The person or company affected would have the exclusive right 
> to make substantive edits to that template. The result would be a 
> section that is the person's view on the issue; if they want to make a 
> radical departure from the truth that would be their right within that 
> context.  If the subject tries to put the same information in the main 
> body of the article that would be subject to the usual meat-grinder rules.

This strikes me as a really bad idea, going completely against the 
core NPOV policy, as well as the principle that nobody owns any part 
of any article.  Why should any part of main article space (or 
templates included in it) be controlled by outside people and used to 
present their (perhaps distorted) view of reality?  That's what the 
subjects' own (personal, organizational, and corporate) web space is 
for.  Web hosting is really cheap these days, and when you've got 
your own site you can use it to promote your own POV as much as you 
want.  Then, if you're the subject of a Wikipedia article, it's 
reasonable for that article to have an external link to your site 
(including its anti-Wikipedia rants, if that's part of the site's 
content). This works out reasonably well for everybody; the subject's 
POV is easily available in exactly the form the subject wants it to 
be, but it's also clearly at arm's-length from Wikipedia itself, 
which remains in an NPOV style.

-- 
== Dan ==
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