[WikiEN-l] Slashdot article

[Ken Arromdee]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2008 WJhonson at aol.com wrote:
>Firstly, our articles are not about "corrections" because they are not  about 
>"errors".  Attribution isn't truth, so it can't be in error.  The only way 
>for an attribution to be in error is to mis-quote it.

By common sense, if a Wikipedia article claims something and it's not true,
that's an error, even if it is in fact true that a source made the
erroneous claim and we merely reported on the source.  Claiming it's not
an error privileges technicalities over the real world, which is one of
the problems that BLP tries to solve.

>We do
>not require someone to publish in a secondary  source in order to quote them. 

That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article.

And it's not about quoting them, anyway, it's about correcting an error.
An error can be corrected by removing the erroneous information as well as
by adding a quote saying that the error is an error.

>Secondly, we do not assume that a secondary source "would do  fact-checking". 
>Rather our policy clearly (or should clearly) state that  we *use* those 
>secondary sources who *are known for* doing fact-checking.

That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article.

>Thirdly our COI rules do not prevent a person from changing their own  
>biography.

That doesn't seem to be how it actually went, according to the article.
Seeing a pattern here?

>Finally, as others have pointed out, we have no way of knowing whether an  
>editor is who-they-claim-to-be.

If you can do a cursory search of someone, and find nothing indicating an
obvious fake, and if the request would be relatively noncontroversial, it's
extremely likely that this is the person in question.  Assuming that it is
would result in vastly fewer errors than pretending we have no idea.