[WikiEN-l] History of "Verifiability, not truth"

[Relata Refero]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:02 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> On Apr 10, 2008, at 1:48 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
> >
> > A sad case in point being the scientologist driven campaign to shut
> > down
> > The anon.penet.fi server. The Observer was spoofed by them into
> > reporting
> > that 90% of child porn on the internet is trafficed by the server.
> > Even though
> > The Observers own readers wrote in in huge volume that that was quite
> > preposterous, espescially as Julf had put severe restrictions on the
> > size
> > of emails that could be sent through penet, and yet, The Observer
> > never
> > admitted it had erred, but merely pedaled down the story by noting
> > that
> > "Johan Helsingius had consistently denied the allegations." Which is a
> > very poor form of apology for getting the story wrong.
>
>
> To my mind, this settles the issue. There are clearly instances where
> accuracy and truth are pre-requisites for material. We simply do not
> report absurd slanders like this. Anybody who does not understand this
> should find a different project.
>
> -Phil


This may be a case for WP:IAR.

OTOH, Phil, you need to realise that Wikipedia does not exist to fix things
the rest of the world has got wrong.

RR