[WikiEN-l] Delete Daniel Brandt

Mon Jun 12 04:40:18 UTC 2006

Phil Sandifer wrote:

>
>Wikipedia offers no defense, and no protection. And users who have  
>had nothing to do with Daniel Brandt are put in danger. I had never  
>edited his article and had never spoken with him when he began  
>contemplating making me leave my PhD program. But I became a target.  
>I was and am powerless to stop being a target. So are about 200 other  
>people. Including, let's note, a bunch of teenagers. And do you  
>really think most of us, when we made our first edit or accepted our  
>RFA, thought we were getting into this?
>
So how is working on WP fundamentally different from selling items on
eBay, getting into arguments on Usenet, or sending patches to a Linux
mailing list? You play around on the net, you're going to be visible
to the whole world, for better or worse. The archives still record
various stupid things I wrote in public over two decades ago, they
are never going away.

We've got all these editors who get all kinds of egoboo from the
credit for working on a top-20 website, and who apparently don't
reflect that it means they're being scrutinized by that many
millions of eyeballs, not all of them friendly. WP is a serious
endeavour, not a toy - for each WP edit, I consider whether
I would be willing to show it to a family member, discuss it
in a job interview, etc. If editors aren't thinking about all this,
perhaps the login creation page needs to explain it better.

(I thought teenagers couldn't edit without parental approval
anyway, since they don't have legal standing to agree to GFDL.)

Stan