[WikiEN-l] BLP, and admin role in overriding community review

[Charlotte Webb]

On 5/23/07, Joe Szilagyi <szilagyi at gmail.com> wrote:
> If it's a flagrant attack article ("JOE SUCKS, FRED SUCKS,
> etc") nuke under CSD. For stuff like Crystal Gale, scrub, stub. Leave
> history for people to work off.

Indeed, learning to distinguish between these scenarios is the first step.

> Protect, get it rebuilt right. Leave history
> for a while. Let admins rebuild the shell under protection like Ron Jeremy
> and that Scientology lady's one was. Once the article is fixed, nuke the
> original history to clean it up for good.

Generally speaking, that would violate the terms of the GFDL, which
requires us to maintain documentation of all changes that are made.

Sometimes sloppy workarounds are used, such as pasting a dump of the
edit history (really just a list of usernames/IPs, timestamps, and
edit summaries) in a prominent location, such as the talk page (this
is usually used for pages that get transwikied to another project).
This is believed to satisfy our legal requirement to adequately give
attribution to all users who contributed to the article.

There are also a practical argument. Back to your [[Joe Szilagyi]]
article example. Bob writes an article about you. Alice adds several
more paragraphs. Zachary writes "Szilagyi was also one of the hobos on
the grassy knoll." Sam fixes some of Alice's typos . John re-writes
the third paragraph. Kim writes "lol kimberly was here". Max reverts
Kim. Larry adds a paragraph about your guitar collection. Jack removes
the grassy knoll bit. Others make more edits.

Robert reads the history and blocks Zachary for "libelous additions to
BLP articles". James takes it upon himself to "nuke" all revisions
containing the grassy knoll libel

Months later, Zachary says he's been busy in real life and wants to
know why he was blocked. Zachary's bad edits have been
deleted/oversighted, so nobody can figure it out why he was blocked.
Robert can't be contacted because he has quit the project.

Zachary is unblocked and proceeds to disrupt other articles. Fred
discovers that the guitar paragraph is bullshit and you've never owned
a guitar. He interrogates Jack who now appears to be the one who added
the false information. Jack can't easily prove otherwise.

The [[Joe Szilagyi]] article is later included in a popular DVD
package. Sam and John, who made good-faith contributions, are
justifiably upset for not being credited.

Seriously, there's got to be a better way than this.

—C.W.