Wikipedia has fostered and promoted a clearly unethical practice of allowing anonymous unaccountable people to manage the most prominent information available on named victims. This is unethical by any standards in any society. A WP biography will be read by everyone with even a passing interest in the person. The people who read this information are told that Wikipedia is an “encyclopedia.”

People are either promoting the continuation of this unseemly, damaging practice, or they are campaigning against it. Take your pick.

A trial is fine. Finding a way of protecting BLPs from plausible and persistent vandalism is a good idea. But I’m irked at the growing BLP absolutism at Wikipedia. People are seriously considering getting rid of BLPs, or imposing draconian editing restrictions (i.e. real names only) as a way of solving the problem. There are people out there on Wikipedia Review suggesting that the world would be better off if Wikipedia was destroyed, because that would get rid of BLPs. (I miss the days when the critics’ sites were more concerned with ”opposing” censorship). I’m especially irked at the idea that those who are lax on BLPs have no ethical compass. The New York Times or CNN surely have led to a lot more hurt feelings than Wikipedia. Google also has a huge potential to “do harm” to living people. Do these organization engage in such ethical handwringing about their very existence? Much less blogs or gossip columns or tabloids (if you think that MMORPG-playing nerds with no social skills violate BLP). Not that those should be the model for wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s strength is its openness, not its 100% accuracy. The only way to deal with the problem, ultimately, is to say “no big deal, it’s just Wikipedia” and “nobody should trust Wikipedia completely”. There’s no way to make Wikipedia absolutely perfect without destroying it. Do we want the Wikipedia that makes the internet not suck, by giving the world access to information on every conceivable topic (including much information that was nonexistent, or in even more unreliable form, or very difficult to find on the Internet)? Or do we want a perfect Wikipedia that garners no bad press, and is absolutely immune from lawsuits, and doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings, but only has a fraction of the content?

The image of Wikipedia you get from reading Wikipedia Review, or the press, or OTRS complaints only represents a small fraction of Wikipedia’s true impact in the real world. Most of that’s just drama. But more and more, its all that Wikipedia insiders care about, even the ArbCom and Jimmy Wales.

At the root of this campaign is to end Wikipedia’s unethical practice of compiling information on living people to sit at the top of google searches, which allows anyone with a grudge to anonymously defame the victim within seconds. Flagged Revisions is step towards ending that insidious and disgraceful feature of Wikipedia.

This practice happens repeatedly, as evidenced by numerous studies. Damaging edits from drive-by “vandals” have been proven to stick for days, weeks and months. Long enough to be carried to many mirror and scraper sites.

This is the real issue. Forget about all that “consensus” garbage and the “feelings of your community”.Free editing on BLPs should never have been allowed in the first place.

Something we talked about on podcast before about “forums” is that if there was some easy way to just search the discussions and talk pages, that might help a lot.

There is now, however, the [[Wikipedia:Centralized_discussion]] page which did indeed list the straw poll, and we should use more and more. It is probably the closest thing to a fair notice, “Hear ye, hear ye” board we have.

It seems there is also a new movement for “flagged protection” which seems like a workable King Solomon approach to implementing a version of flagged revisions.

That said, any poll that gets several hundred votes on en:wp is likely significant.

Feel free to call me out on this if it sounds like a way out-there conspiracy theory, but no one seems to have noticed that on the day after The Washington Post published a piece railing against us for our treatment of political figures (based on the exact same kind of vandalism we’ve experienced for years, nothing new there), they launch a wiki project of their own (WhoRunsGov) about the very same topic.

Looks like yellow journalism from where I’m standing, and frankly I’m surprised that Jimbo would be so reactionary. He’s weathered the storm of much worse criticism before…