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

Mon Oct 25 00:14:51 UTC 2010

On 24/10/2010 23:48, David Gerard wrote:
> On 24 October 2010 23:40, ????<wiki-list at phizz.demon.co.uk>  wrote:
>
>> Oh well that's OK then. One Encyclopaedia puts an fake entry into the
>> work about a fictitious person (born in bangs, died in an explosion,
>> whilst working for combustible), and that absolutely justifies having a
>> site that boasts of containing the worlds knowledge, where every page
>> can be turned on its head from one page request to the next.
>> Whatever was I thinking? Of course the vandalism, POV pushing, and plain
>> old altering of pages to 'win' an argument in the pub or the David Ike
>> forum, is exactly the same as what goes on at the New Columbia Encyclopedia.
>
>
> It's entirely unclear what it is you're actually expecting to achieve
> in participating in discussion here, either in particular or in
> general. Could you please detail what you want to achieve and what you
> actually expect to?
>

Perhaps you aren't listening? Although I do notice moments where you 
tend to make the same points. Still what I'm trying to do is to at least 
get some here to think as to how one might produce a body of work that 
can be relied upon. Where the body of work isn't continually under 
attack or being buggered about with.

In the case of drugs it is entirely unclear why the pages should reflect 
this months news reports. Someone dies in Epping Forest a drug is blamed 
and someone adds that to the article page for the drug. The drug may or 
may not have been responsible the person putting the report on the page 
has no way of knowing. You'll remember that those two kids died in the 
UK and some recreational drug mephedrone was blamed. It turned out that 
neither had taken the stuff. Here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephedrone

you'll find this:

     According to Fiona Measham, a criminologist who is a member
     of the ACMD, the reporting of the unconfirmed deaths by
     newspapers followed "the usual cycle of ‘exaggeration,
     distortion, inaccuracy and sensationalism'" associated with
     the reporting of recreational drug use"

its worth holding on to that thought as it happens not just with 
recreational drugs, but with almost every medical story. The newspapers 
distort and exaggerate. Actually this particular quote is a bit of an 
exaggeration in itself the full section currently reads:

     Toxicology reports following the deaths of two teenagers
     (Louis Wainwright, 18, and Nicholas Smith, 19) that were
     widely reported by the media to be caused by mephedrone,
     and which led to a ban on the substance in April 2010,
     showed that the teenagers had in fact not taken any
     mephedrone.[76] According to Fiona Measham, a criminologist
     who is a member of the ACMD, the reporting of the unconfirmed
     deaths by newspapers followed "the usual cycle of ‘exaggeration,
     distortion, inaccuracy and sensationalism'" associated with the
     reporting of recreational drug use.

The two teenagers died on March 15th and the Fiona Measham article was 
published online 3 days before the two teenagers died. The current state 
of the article implies that it is the reporting of the events 
surrounding those two teenagers that she is referring to, when in fact 
it is not.