[WikiEN-l] Slashdot article

[Philip Sandifer]

On Oct 28, 2008, at 5:49 PM, WJhonson at aol.com wrote:

>
> In a message dated 10/28/2008 2:35:44 PM Pacific Daylight Time,
> snowspinner at gmail.com writes:
>
> "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.">>
>
>
> -----------------
> This has absolutely nothing to do with what occurred.
> What occurred was that the subject of the BLP made claims and this  
> entire
> thread is about whether we can alter an article based on the subject  
> of the BLP
> making claims without our ability to identify whether that person is  
> actually
> who they claim to be.
>
> That is all it's about.  It's not about any thing  else.

Nobody has argued that we should alter based purely on Lanier's edits  
to the wiki. But on the other hand, Lanier's edits to the wiki should  
have been sufficient cause to look at the claims and fix the article.  
That the article went un-fixed after his edits is inexcusable.

Lanier's claims should have caused the article to be fixed. That is  
not equivalent to "We should have changed the article on his say-so."

-Phil