[WikiEN-l] Talking to Jimmy Wales about discussion

[Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 12:15 PM, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On 9/8/08, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think BLP is more a moral issue than a legal one, the foundation is
> > pretty well protected legally. The moral issues are less important for
> > a site where it's clearly just random people chatting than a
> > world-famous encyclopaedia that's at the top of Google results for
> > practically everything, so I think things are ok.
>
> Behavior which differs based on audience cannot possibly be a "moral"
> issue either. More of an image/self-consciousness issue, I'd argue.
>
> —C.W.


This is not true in the least.  There are clear ethical issues arising from
the fact that a Wikipedia article on a living person will generally become
one of the highest (if not the very highest) search-engine result for that
person's name.  Writing a Wikipedia article including derogatory information
about someone is not the same thing as writing a comment on some other
random website.

Newyorkbrad