[WikiEN-l] Getting hammered in a tv interview is not fun

[Slim Virgin]

On 3/29/07, Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca> wrote:
> Slim Virgin wrote:
> > We're going to have more than a major hole in our coverage if we lose a lawsuit.
>
> Why? Aside from requiring us to take down whatever libelous
> misinformation we lost the case over (which we would want to do
> _anyway_), what limitation would it put on Wikipedia's coverage?

If someone with money were to sue Wikipedia for having damaged him --
or were to finance a lawsuit brought by someone else -- it could end
up costing a great deal because of the global distribution of the
content, and perhaps also because we've not shown ourselves to be
deadly serious about getting rid of defamation. Unlike news
organizations Wikipedia has no libel insurance so it could put us out
of business.
>
> > The ideal thing would be to come up with a working definition of
> > "borderline notable" and to give those people the right to have their
> > bios deleted on request. But this being Wikpedia, we'll never agree on
> > a definition.
>
> Largely because IMO such a thing is impossible to define in anything
> like an objective manner.

We could come up with an imperfect working definition.
>
> > Another good idea is not to allow living bios on people who have not
> > already had a bio published by a reliable source. That would massively
> > reduce our coverage, but it would solve almost all of our problems.
>
> It would leave at least one really massive problem though; we'd lack
> coverage of everyone who doesn't already have a bio published by a
> reliable source (for whatever value of "reliable source" gets settled
> on). For a resource that's claiming to be a general encyclopedia this
> would be a _massive_ omission.

It would be an omission for sure. It would mean only truly notable
people got WP bios.
>
> > The worst option is to continue as we are, where a huge number of
> > living bios are either vanity articles or attack pages.
>
> If that's the worst option you can think of you're suffering from a
> drastic lack of imagination. We could get rid of BLP entirely, for
> example, and start encouraging original research into geneology. :)
> Also, I'd like to know how you know that there's a "huge number" of
> vanity articles and attack pages on Wikipedia.

I don't know how many there are, and I've not kept any kind of
records. I know that I've encountered a large number of problematic
bios, or biographical material inside other articles, where people
with grudges have inserted false material maliciously, or for a laugh.
 And the problems of vanity articles are well known, though less
pressing.

> We already have a lot of
> policies and a lot of editors working against those things, most of the
> problems I've seen slip through the cracks have been pretty trivial
> cases (like this one).
>
We had a case that went on for months, despite complaints to Jimbo,
where someone inserted into an article about a news organization that
a certain journalist (who was a critic of that news organization) had
had an affair with his secretary, or words to that effect. In the
grand scheme of things, it was small potatoes, but it might have been
enough to end his marriage. I managed to get rid of it eventually, but
only after a revert war, lots of personal attacks from the people who
had added it, and so on. The journalist didn't make a giant fuss, and
so it didn't become one of our well-known cases (and I suspect that's
why he didn't make a fuss).

I'm guessing that this kind of thing goes on a lot under the radar,
and that one day we're going to do it to the wrong person. I'd like to
see an imaginative solution before that happens.

Sarah