[WikiEN-l] Experiment on new pages

Thu Dec 8 02:08:08 UTC 2005

Ray Saintonge wrote:

>> What does Siegenthaler want?  Does he want Wikipedia to stop allowing
>> volunteer contributors?  Does he want Congress to remove the
>> protections given to ISPs for merely carrying content produced by
>> others?  Does he want to take away the ability of Internet speakers to
>> be anonymous?  Does he want to start licensing or bonding people who
>> produce content to distribute over the Internet?
>>
> Maybe he just wants more awareness around the problem, which certainly 
> more complex than Wikipedia's involvement in the issue.

My read is that his reaction was fundamentally "OMG, I had no idea
all this was going on". The allegations would have been just as
problematic had they appeared on a random blog - freepers and
stormfronters would have been perfectly happy to have them posted
on their sites - so his complaints apply to most of the net, have
little to do with WP specifically (but of course we want to be
a much better reference than the average website).

People that are just now discovering the Internet are simply not
going to have any idea how deep it goes. WP is simply one novel
project among millions, even the experts have trouble keeping up
with the weird stuff that's being tried out every day (the dot com
bust has become a dot star boom...)

Stan