[Foundation-l] Most read US newpaper blasts Wikipedia

Thu Dec 1 10:10:27 UTC 2005

On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Delirium wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>> I don't, in general, see a problem with this.  If something is incorrect in 
>> any way, it should be corrected or removed (whether it is libelous or not 
>> is irrelevant---non-libelous misinformation has no place either).
>
> I should add that, from both an ethical and legal perspective, this is pretty 
> much exactly how all other publicly-editable forums works.  If someone posts 
> a libelous message on an AOL message board, or in a livejournal, or anywhere

WHAT other publicly-editable forums?  I don't know of any at the level of 
group-authorship of quotes, sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Wikipedia has developed and propagated an elaborate and nuanced style 
guide -- from the detailed external link policy down to the popularization 
of the term "disambiguation" -- one of its greatest accomplishments. 
This is what helps thousands of unrelated people to work together to 
maintain a high apparent standard of quality and consistency.

WP also implicitly has an apparent editorial standard, as there is no 
single name or person or author associated with an article -- not even a 
list of names, if you just read the main article page and don't know which 
magic buttons to press; other mediawiki instances (wikitravel) are better 
about this.  No forum, newsgroup, etc I can think of has ever given off 
that same impression.

--SJ