[Foundation-l] Paid editing, was Re: Ban and moderate

Sun Oct 24 07:55:42 UTC 2010

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 08:15,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
> See I took Atorvastatin and you wouldn't let the project report that the
> Stanford Medical Journal reported that it causes more damage to the heart than
> is acceptable.  You want us only to report things once the controversy is
> over, in other words once 25,000 people have gotten sick from salmonella
> eggs... not just a thousand.  No wait, actually after all the lawsuits are over
> and the people involved are all dead as well.

We should not be using our own judgment in these matters. If the
London Times or BBC report problems with Lipitor, or anything else,
that's a good enough source for us, and we should not be allowing
editors to stop it from being added to our articles.

The sourcing policy, Verifiability, has always been about identifying
good-enough sources, not perfect ones, allowing editors to make
decisions in context about how to present things neutrally, making
sure significant-minority views are included.

But for the last couple of years there has been a very worrying push
toward scientific point of view and the exclusion of high-quality
mainstream media sources.

In the case of articles about drugs, this effectively leaves the
pharmaceutical companies in charge of Wikipedia's content, because
they are the ones who finance most of the studies.