[WikiEN-l] Playing zap (Was the bad BLP)

[Ray Saintonge]

Philip Sandifer wrote:
> Yet another reason why our fetishistic obsession with sources needs to  
> be toned down. By treating them as the be-all and end-all of content  
> we make it far too easy to get utter lies through by citing them to a  
> source. The worst are book sources - I know Danny, at one point,  
> created a hoax article cited to a non-existent book with the ISBN of a  
> Dr. Seuss book. This, of course, attracted no notice while we  
> zealously remove entire accurate articles on important subjects for a  
> lack of sources.
>   
This all comes from spoon-feeding readers into the expectation that 
sources have been accurately interpreted.  Similarly with copyright if 
we purport to guarantee that our material is reusable the reusers take 
that as an excuse to avoid their own due diligence.
> Wish I could remember what the article he created was so I could go  
> delete it. He did it under a sock. It was on an African politician. I  
> probably should have deleted it at the time, but I didn't feel like  
> starting a fight with Danny.
Not starting a fight with X probably comes up more often than it 
should.  We weigh accuracy against the willingness to engage in a 
protracted fight with some known tendentious individual.

Ec