[WikiEN-l] Yet another PR company busted ... apparently it's all our fault

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 7:21 PM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> On 16 November 2012 14:38, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 2:28 PM, David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> There is a  fundamental difference between our inefficient and
> >> sometimes unsuccessful attempts to do things right, and their
> >> deliberate attempts to do things wrong.
>
> > Yes, but we must not forget that PR people are not the only people who
> use
> > Wikipedia to do things wrong. By operating the completely open system we
> > do, we enable *anyone* to do wrong, be they PR or staff working for a
> > company, or a company's detractors.
> >
> > The community is responsible for managing Wikipedia. And whether
> Wikipedia
> > is easy or difficult to abuse is the community's responsibility.
>
> I suppose this line of argument might be of some interest to someone
> looking for a dissertation topic in moral philosophy (as has been
> noted, it is off-topic). What happens to the notion of "agency"
> online?
>
> Still, I can't accept that it makes sense of some putative connection
> inherent in wiki technology, collective responsibility, and mere
> participation as an editor. Talking about the "community" as a way of
> avoiding talking about the intentions of the actors here is a neat
> trick. I think the meaning of "wrong" is being slurred here. I
> certainly don't think one should talk about enabling when editing is
> always a conditional permission rather than any kind of right, and the
> permission is given for a definite reason. And so on. The usual
> approach would surely be to look first at who is hosting the site when
> you seek to assign responsibility.



Well, no, because the Foundation has made it abundantly clear that they
assume no responsibility whatsoever for content, or for questions like
whether we have flagged revisions or not. All of that is fully delegated to
the community.

We know we have more than four million articles and not enough people
watching them. Every time something happens like the examples I gave earlier

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/in-a-web-of-lies-the-newspaper-must-live.premium-1.469273

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard&oldid=522638898#Muna_AbuSulayman

or the sort of thing SmartSE raised here the other day

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=523399299#Spotting_off-wiki_disputes_that_end_up_causing_serious_problems_here

or even the thing Wizardman raised on the same page

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=523399299#The_main_problem_with_the_site

the responsibility for having allowed it to happen lies with the community,
not with the Foundation.

But the community generally is not aware of that responsibility, or denies
it, and certainly lacks any efficient organ to exercise it. At most, you
sometimes get people worrying whether "Wikipedia might get sued", when in
reality, thanks to Section 230 safe harbour provisions,

* the only people who ever might theoretically get sued over content they
added are individual editors, and
* the Foundation has no more responsibility for Wikipedia content than
gmail has editorial responsibility for the content of our e-mails.

So the community designs the system under which Wikipedia operates.

And DGG is right: the aim is not to minimise the number of complaints, but
the number of *justified* complaints. You can't do that without changing
the system that is generating the problems, and that's up to the community,
not the Foundation.

Andreas