[WikiEN-l] Self-sensorship, how far should it go?

[K P]

On 7/29/07, Steve Summit <scs at eskimo.com> wrote:
> Fred Bauder wrote:
> > But is there anything to it? Or is it just nasty gossip?
> > If you want to gossip, join the Navy.
>
> There's a fine line to be trodden here.  Certainly, we don't
> want or need to dignify wild rumors with any attention at all.
> But once a story "has legs" (and whether it deserves them or not),
> too-strenuous attempts to deny it only fuel the speculations that
> there *is* a cabal and a cover-up -- and those speculations can
> end up driving more long-term damage than the original, spurious
> accusation would have.
>
> A single, simple statement on Slim's user or talk page, saying
> that the rumor is false, would be much better than all this
> rampant reverting by ElinorD, Jayjg, and Crum375.  (And there may
> have been other reverters, sorry if I left you out, but evidently
> this issue has become so "serious" that [[User talk:SlimVirgin]]
> has had a bunch of its history deleted.)
>

There are some questions that remain, though.  Like why would it be
discussed on Wikipedia, along the lines of why discuss every lame hate
site that ever put 'clopedia' after a grunt and spewed venom about
some other race/religion or whatever on this list?

In what manner and for what purpose is it being discussed on
Wikipedia?  People's talk pages aren't their personal blogs.  And
article talk pages are to discuss articles.  Is this news?  What
newspapers has it been reported in?   Is it ever going to be real
news?

Of course, Steve has an excellent point in that deleting every mention
of it is drawing more attention to the incident than it merits.  I
don't even know what slashdot is, and now the need to delete it
everywhere has piqued my curiosity.

Trying to shut people up often backfires, because those doing it can
reach a point where they're not evaluating what is going on to the
detriment of their success at stopping the topic.  The idea behind
shutting someone up is to stop the talk, and calling a greater amount
of attention to your attempt to shut them up, than was ever given to
the talkers, just increases the gossip, it doesn't stop anything.

KP