User:Seddon/Wikipedia

Wikipedia will never be perfect. I mean we are lucky it goes as well as it does. The trouble is that we will always have religious, racial, political and the just down right idiodic mavericks editing and creating drama which will always give wikipedia a bad reputation. We are just going to

BLP
The risk of libel and defamation is high. People are and have been for some time, answerable for defamatory comments made in articles. Even when all there is to connect them is a lone IP. These can be traced and positively identified with people who make such comments. There are however further risks to the wikimedia projects, with the possibility of the Wikimedia Foundation being sued for allowing such defamation to occur.

This means there are three reasons to tighten up the editting on BLP's:


 * Protecting users from law suits
 * Protecting those that are subjects of a BLP
 * Protecting the Wikimedia Foundation from law suits.

Reliability
Wikipedia has, since its inception, been critised for its open editting model. Many say that it should be peer reviewed, that its articles should undergo higher scrutiny. It is however clear that this has been tried and effectively failed to become successful on at least two occasions. From wikipedia's first incarnation, Nupedia, to its near cousin, Citizendium, restricted and closed editting simply does not work. At least not when you work from the bottom up. Britanica has recently allowed anonymous user to suggest additions or revisions to articles. Its clear allowing the mass users to make such suggestions is a move in the right direction.