On Oct 28, 2008, at 12:33 AM, WJhonson(a)aol.com wrote:
That isn't what occurred.
What occurred was that the editor stated "I am this person and I
say this"
It's not whether we can verify who the editor is, it's whether we
can verify
that they are the subject.
You're still treating this as some sort of theoretical exercise as
opposed to an article about a real person, and you're drawing inane
technical distinctions that have little to no bearing on the real
world. 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," but I doubt I'd care about whatever
bizarrely technical distinction you concocted.
We were informed about problems on a BLP. Instead of taking those
problems seriously and looking at the article, we ignored them because
we disliked how we were informed. This despite the fact that the
problems were real, and that, contrary to your assertions, no sources
backed up the claims. None. The film director claim was unsourced in
the article, and nothing later in the article talked about the film he
made. The McCluhan interpretation was unsourced and wrong.
The article sucked. We got a complaint. And because we disliked how
the complaint was lodged, we ignored it. That is a case of process
trumping outcome in the most toxic way imaginable, and no amount of
bullshit technicalities change the basic fact that we actively chose
to ignore a problem in a BLP - a problem that needed nothing more than
cursory investigation from a user to identify.
-Phil