User talk:69.173.200.3

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While your comment was at least slightly amusing, can I ask you not to deface Wikipedia again please. Thanks. — Trilobite (Talk) 18:28, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

ARRRGGH! So you're one of these people who vandalises the site in order to test our ability to keep our content free of inaccuracy and graffiti, a practice I regard as similar to dropping litter in the street in order to determine whether there are any good citizens who will come and pick it up! Never mind, at least it was cleaned up. It's good to know you're curious about the way we work. There's much you could read on this site about policy and procedure, but perhaps I'd direct you first to our replies to common objections. As we are now by quite a long way the world's largest encyclopedia (though far from its most comprehensive in very many areas of human knowledge) a large body of experience has been built up in how to deal with these sort of things, including simple hit-and-run vandals who make edits like yours, all the way to more insidious introduction of inaccuracy and bias. The debate about our reliability will no doubt rage on for a long time. We have very many critics but once you get to know the way we work you may be pleasantly surprised by our quality and reliability. Or maybe not: that's for you to decide. Anyway thanks for your test and I'd recommend having a look around to get a feel for how we make decisions about content. You'll see for example that the editorial discussions surrounding the pope article (all carried out in public in the interests of transparency) run to many many thousands of words, just days after his election. Cheers. — Trilobite (Talk) 19:02, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)