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

Wed Sep 22 01:54:58 UTC 2004

I have written a response to Barry, offlist, and posted it at
[[Talk:National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth]]. Perhaps you could
forward this suggestion about an external link to the Academy's information
page to him.

Fred

> From: Bryan Derksen <bryan.derksen at shaw.ca>
> Reply-To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 19:25:23 -0700
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] [Barry.Meatyard at warwick.ac.uk: Entry in  Wikipedia]
> 
> 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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
> 