[WikiEN-l] [Barry.Meatyard at warwick.ac.uk: Entry in Wikipedia]

Wed Sep 22 02:25:23 UTC 2004

At 01:39 AM 9/22/2004 +0200, Jens Ropers wrote:

>Maybe we should just send these guys this link [
>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml? 
>title=National_Academy_for_Gifted_and_Talented_Youth&action=edit ] and
>tell them to work away.
>
>Wouldn't that be a near-perfect solution?
>What do people think?

It wouldn't be a perfect solution in this case, because in addition to 
simply inquiring about how editing is done Barry is also asking for the 
removal of certain versions from the article history and for the version 
that their representative writes to be "protected" in some way. We need to 
explain both that we can't comply with those requests, and also that those 
things won't actually be necessary in order to get a nicely neutral article 
written and maintained against POV.

Personally, I'd recommend to them that they add an external link to their 
own "about us" page (to reassure them that they'll always have a way to 
present themselves according to their own terms) and to make copious use of 
the talk: page to explain and attribute any corrections they make to the 
article itself so that future editors will have a better idea of which 
information comes from which sources (while also pointing out that talk: 
pages have different community standards than article text, so that what 
they write there is pretty much immune from "tampering"). That's still no 
guarantee that the article will remain in the form that they prefer, but 
the information they add will hopefully be authoritative enough that it'll 
be hard to replace with inaccuracies in the future. Other editors will much 
more easily notice biases creeping back in if there's notes in talk: to 
work from.