Phil Sandifer wrote:
On Jun 12, 2006, at 12:40 AM, Stan Shebs wrote:
So how is working on WP fundamentally different
from selling items on
eBay, getting into arguments on Usenet, or sending patches to a Linux
mailing list? You play around on the net, you're going to be visible
to the whole world, for better or worse. The archives still record
various stupid things I wrote in public over two decades ago, they
are never going away.
Or for that matter, from posting on MySpace.
Which, of course, is working overtime to protect its members from
getting killed. Similarly, eBay offers an extensive array of
protections to its users.
And these are profitmaking ventures with budgets many orders of
magnitude greater than WP. Scaling down to WP size will net you
maybe 200USD/year for a protection fund, not much you can do with
that.
We've got
all these editors who get all kinds of egoboo from the
credit for working on a top-20 website, and who apparently don't
reflect that it means they're being scrutinized by that many
millions of eyeballs, not all of them friendly. WP is a serious
endeavour, not a toy - for each WP edit, I consider whether
I would be willing to show it to a family member, discuss it
in a job interview, etc. If editors aren't thinking about all this,
perhaps the login creation page needs to explain it better.
And? I do that with everything I post on the Internet. Only problem
is, it's tough to think "What is a psychopath going to think of this?"
Psychopaths have been on the net from the beginning, I've run into a
few. You want to play on the bigtime websites, you're signing up for
bigger risks.
(I thought
teenagers couldn't edit without parental approval
anyway, since they don't have legal standing to agree to GFDL.)
We have teenage admins who I'm pretty sure we did not get permission
slips from.
We should be identifying and booting all underage editors (admin
status is irrelevant, from legal pov) until their parents have
been informed of the risks and give permission.
Stan