[WikiEN-l] Slashdot article

[Philip Sandifer]

On Oct 28, 2008, at 5:15 PM, WJhonson at aol.com wrote:

>
> In a message dated 10/28/2008 12:52:02 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
> snowspinner at gmail.com writes:
>
> I am not  saying anything of the sort.>>
>
>
> ----------------
> You said Phil, that you did not see the difference between verifying a
> person's identity and verifying the identity of the subject.   
> Perhaps you  did not
> realize that I was referring strictly to an editor who claims to be  
> the
> subject of a BLP.
>

You are making no sense, and appear to be willfully misconstruing what  
I say. On the off-chance that your lunacy has somehow convinced  
somebody that I have a position anything like what you are describing,  
I will clarify.

What I said was:

"I want to take away the right for an editor to revert an edit for the  
sole reason that we can't verify the person's identity so what they  
say doesn't count. I want to mandate actually looking at the sources,  
thinking about the issue, and making a decision based on something  
other than "The rules say X, period."

To this, you said that "It's not whether we can verify who the editor  
is, it's whether we can  verify
that they are the subject."

I then said "I would ask how "whether we can verify that they are the  
subject" is in any way a substantively different issue than "whether  
we can verify their identity,""

The point, which you are bafflingly unwilling to grasp, is that the  
issue of identity verification should be immaterial to how we respond  
to a complaint, except inasmuch as common decency necessitates that if  
someone even appears to be asking us to change our article about them  
we ought look into what they are asking.

In this case, a lengthy complaint about the article was posted to the  
article page. It was (correctly) removed and then discussed on the  
talk page, where the discussion turned into sniping about Lanier  
instead of actually considering the claims and their accuracy.

The closest thing I am saying to "the subject of a BLP should be given  
special privileges" is that I am saying that anything that even looks  
like the subject complaining about the article should be taken  
seriously and investigated on the merits of the claims. Even if the  
complaint is of questionable authenticity and comes in via a channel  
that is not one of our preferred channels.

What went toxically wrong here was that because Lanier lodged his  
complaints in a way other than our top choice, we ignored him. That  
was the wrong move.

-Phil