monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
just in time
so i was watching wikipedia vision, a mostly useless but entertaining glimpse at edits to wikipedia real-time, when i saw some racist vandalism occur to the online encyclopedia. someone in england posted a comment about a neighborhood in london being downtrodden by youths of a particular ethnic group selling drugs. so i clicked quickly on the page, and began the process of undo-ing the change. but someone beat me to it! the racist edit was removed by someone else just 7 seconds after it had been entered into the encyclopedia. my 30 seconds was just too slow. amazingly fast!
also, wikipedia is problematic.
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29. October 2007 at 10:53 pm :
what if it was actually true?
29. October 2007 at 11:02 pm :
that did cross my mind, or at least portions of the edit. the neighborhood might be degrading. but it implied direct causality to the ethnic group and the assumed drug dealing habits of that ethnic group. so to say it’s ‘true’ would be to agree for the most part with that assumption and direct causality. but the wikipedia must be neutral and avoid just personal opinion.
so that would probably need a more involved discussion of the causality and other factors, including citable external publications that had similar neutrality, before it would be appropriate and reach a standard of care for an encyclopedia… and the post had none of that therefore was simply vandalism.
i think whenever writing has a potential to harm, the standard of care must be higher than other conjecture or personal opinion; in particular that potential to harm is magnified when the medium or author is well respected and well read. so then there is a greater standard that we should apply. this is how i feel about dr. watson’s recent racist comments. while it would bother me to hear poor racist opinions from just anybody, it was particularly egregious from in a position of leadership and respect. i hold him to a higher standard of care, in much the same way i would hold the wikipedia.