[WikiEN-l] People editing their own Wikipedia articles.

[Matt Brown]

Daniel Brandt is far from the first subject of a Wikipedia article to come
along, find the article, and try to 'fix' it, edit it, delete it, or even
boost themselves on it. And he won't be the last. As Wikipedia becomes more
and more in the public eye, and as well-known people become more and more
familiar with online things, we'll see it quite often.

We should be more prepared for this. Do we even have a page to point people
at if they are themselves the subject of a Wikipedia article, explaining how
Wikipedia works when it comes to biographies of living persons, and how they
should engage with Wikipedia to improve articles on themselves? If not, we
should.

We should also try and interact better ourselves with these people, and
recognise that in most cases their intentions are not evil. They simply
don't understand Wikipedia or the way it works, and thus misread and
misinterpret what's going on.

For instance, just yesterday I noticed that an anonymous contributor had
repeatedly removed a piece from the article on a fairly well-known author.
After several rounds of removing it, the anon created a userid and removed
the info again, with an edit comment that the information was inaccurate.
The username was clearly based on that author's name, so I contacted them
asking if they really were the author in question or if they were a fan
using the author's name. The author subsequently contacted me in email and
verified their identity, and we discussed the issue; it turned out that the
incident being removed was one where the author had been quoted in the press
as having said things they insisted they had never said.

I'm working on a peaceful resolution of this, and I'm very hopeful that it
can be achieved.

What concerns me is that for quite a few users, the very idea that a notable
person was attempting to remove information from the article on themselves
would have made them dig in their heels about Wikipedia's rights and
freedoms, the information would have been kept in the article merely to
spite the person, and no doubt threats of lawsuits and the like might have
resulted. We should be aware that many times, if someone is attempting to
change information in an article about themselves, it is because they
honestly believe it to be inaccurate. Nutcases like Brandt aren't the norm.

-Matt