[WikiEN-l] Attack Site Wars, Episode VII... The Return of the Essjay

[John Lee]

On 6/28/07, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Jun 27, 2007, at 11:05 AM, The Mangoe wrote:
>
> > If we think that Wikipedia is important, then Essjay's sins are
> > important. Either it will be an important crisis that we got past, or
> > it will be the first major outbreak of a problem we never learned to
> > deal with. Either way, people ten years from now who write about
> > Wikipedia are going to mention the incident.
>
> I'm skeptical. Why don't we wait ten years and add the article if
> you're right?
>
> Seriously. We're the sixth Google hit on Essjay's real name, and the
> first one related to him. For all his errors, he was a good member of
> the community. He wrote good articles, and was generally a fair, nice
> guy. He made a mistake not on Wikipedia but in talking to a reporter.
> And despite his false credentials, he also didn't fuck those articles
> up with nonsense.
>
> I'm not OK with us being the first thing on him his future employers
> see when they Google him. He was a kid when he made his mistakes, and
> we shouldn't be the ones to tar and feather him for life over them.


I'm uncomfortable about allowing our individual inclinations as editors,
even if there is good moral standing for them, to seep into our editing. To
me, it is the same as allowing ourselves to explicitly condemn, say, the
Holocaust. I won't say I have the answer to this conundrum, but I am not
sure if the answer has to involve imposing our own moral views, no matter
how correct we feel they are, on the encyclopaedia.

The BLP policy is of course grounded, in a sense, in morals, but also in
practicality. Information about a living individual's life is far more
likely to be in flux; the George W. Bush of 2000 may not be the George W.
Bush of 2010, and the John Lee of 2007 may not be the John Lee of 2057. It
makes sense to have a higher sourcing standard for claims about living
individuals, and to take a more aggressive approach to handling possible
libel (especially considering legal issues). There is no need to involve
issues of morality or our own personal subjective judgment in handling
biographies of living people, although we undoubtedly
subconsciously/consciously have because many of us feel it is "right" to
have a strict BLP policy (there is nothing wrong with this provided there is
also an objective basis for our actions).

I am not sure if the circumstances are quite congruent concerning the Essjay
issue. I understand his youthful indiscretion, being a youth myself and
having made many youthful mistakes. I certainly would not want this being
held against him in the future. But at the same time, I can find no basis
for deciding the article on the [[Essjay controversy]] should be deleted
that does not lie in some subjective valuation of morals.

Johnleemk