[WikiEN-l] Joseph Farah: Another dissatisfied customer

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:29 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> ------------------------------------
> Which we already do.  So I'm not seeing what we could have done  differently
> in this case.

We could have had version flagging enabled so that only
wiki-sausage-makers saw this obvious vandalism and so that it didn't
end up spread across the internet, stuck in caches, etc.

This kind of crud happens with some regularity, even with some
regularity to many of the same subjects. "What more could we do?"
isn't a position I think any of you can really support. There are a
great many things we could have done: (roughly less impacting to most)
We could have automated detection and alerting on certain problem
words ('homosexual', 'penis', etc) to reduce the frequency of
vandalism staying in days at a time, we could activate flagging (as
mentioned), we could semi protect all BLPs, we could full protect all
BLPs, we have much looser deletion criteria for BLPs, we could ban
BLPs from them from Wikipedia, we could stop open editing, we could
shut the site down.  We are far from helpless and innocent.

We have a duty to the public: It's our responsibility not to be a
nuisance. If we are unwilling to mitigate the risks of our approach
acceptably eventually the peasants with pitchforks (and legislation…)
will do it for us.