Biographical implications, was Re: [WikiEN-l] Verifiability

Thu Dec 15 23:05:18 UTC 2005

<slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote

>I'm in touch with one man who feels he was defamed in an article. The
information was removed after he contacted Jimbo, but he writes that
he has to check every day to make sure it hasn't been added again.  In
other words, we've changed this man's life, and yet he's not
particularly notable, the people who keep adding the information are
mischief-making, and the claims that were made about him weren't in
any sense newsworthy.

What are the actual implications of this?

Note firstly that if one wants to do random defamation on the Internet, 
there are 30000 newsgroups to choose from - and once sent, a newsgroup 
cannot be then removed from the Google archive (OK, technically perhaps it 
can - but not in the easy way our articles are editable).

WP matters in this only to the extent that WP has got itself a high 
profile - which recent though the result of some millions of hours of 
volunteer time.  We have climbed a small mountain, at least.  Perhaps the 
view now shows us things we happily did not see before.

Certainly, currently, if someone started arguing that WP is media, rather 
than a sort of repository of half-finished research, then that makes sense 
in terms of the kind of reactions we have recently seen.

In this case, can your correspondent really not request admin help, periods 
of page protection, blocking of the malicious editors?

>We need to sort out our publishing philosophy when it comes to the
biographies of living people, or claims about living people in other
articles. Errors in other kinds of articles are annoying, but errors
about living people are potentially cruel and very damaging, even if
they don't reach the level of an actionable libel. We need to start
thinking not only in terms of accuracy and verifiability, but also in
terms of *fairness*.

It is certainly true that if the letter of the law is NPOV and 
verifiability, it should not be the spirit of the law here.  It would be 
just another aspect of the excessively legalistic tone we get, as a reward 
for defining policies better, that people do argue that anything verifiable 
should be in the page.  Obviously it should in some sense be germane.  I 
have had to cut out details of a kidnapped child recently, which was not 
relevant, even though the information was already in the public domain.  And 
yet - we should not admit arguments on content on the basis of who is making 
them.  That really should be ruled out of court.

Charles 