Hol responsibilty to monitor standards of site content

Unfortunately Hugh has chosen to leave this thread off the HOL mail out. He'll have his reasons. He always does. He also is obsessively taking anyones comment off the 'Activity Panel' where you can see the latest comments made by members. However this thread links to an article in a respected national newspaper. It talks about a very serious issue happening in our area. As many people as possible should know what's happening. Are we only into 'candy floss' community news or do we want to be informed about whats actually happening within our community?, (such as the 'drug den' bust in Effingham Rd).
Let the members decide instead of the heavy handed site moderator.

P.S. Watch this comment disappear.

Matt, thanks for your comments. You are quite right, I did omit this posting for the weekly mail and you are already aware of the reasons for that since I have made myself clear in a private message to you.
For the benefit of other members I will explain.

For this site to be effective, one of the things we must ensure is that content published here is true and accurate. Where it is made known to us that something is untrue or misleading we will ask the author to amend it. Where the author declines, we ultimately reserve the right to edit or delete that posting. This is clearly set out in the terms and conditions.

On this occasion. Matt, you reproduced a Guardian article verbatim, except in two respects:

1. The title (you changed it from to "The gang shootings that put police with machine guns on London's streets" to "Green Lanes .... gang violence back within our community")
2. The addition of a picture

Your title implied that the recent incidents have taken place on Green Lanes which the original article did not do. I have checked with the police and they have confirmed that none of the recent incidents took place in Harringay. The nearest was on West Green Road.

You also added a picture with the title “Green Lanes centre of gang violence.” The picture is neither in the original article nor is it taken in Green Lanes.

I do not want this site knowingly to allow misleading and scaremongering content. There are plenty of other publications out there doing that. So, I wrote to you and asked you to change the title. I also added a comment on this post querying the content.

You chose not to respond, either openly or by message. So I changed the title to that in the original Guardian article. You reverted that change to your original, and the current, title. I was left with four choices:

1. Do nothing
2. Enter into a struggle to change the title.
3. Delete the post.
4. Remove reference to it from the latest activity panel so as to minimise its profile and impact.

I chose the fourth option since at the time I felt it offered the best balance between effectiveness and stoking the issue and giving it even higher prominence.

It appears to have been the wrong decision since, the cats clearly out of the bag on this and members visiting from the weekly mailer will have been able to read the title whether they read the article or not.

In the final analysis, however, this post has been useful since it has helped deepen my thinking on the need for factual accuracy.

As for your comment Matt, "Watch this comment disappear", it has not disappeared; not one comment has ever been removed from this site for challenging our policies in the two years and more it’s been running. Every challenge or question is responded to with clear reasoning.