[WikiEN-l] Daniel Brandt rattles sabre

[Geoff Burling]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, David Gerard wrote:

> http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-11-10-n36.html
>
> I urge you to look at the page he has there. You may care to take a
> dated archival copy in case of any of the threatened lawsuits
> eventuating.
>
He does have a point about his article: anyone can come along & add
information that would put him in a negative light.

So he decides to do the dumb thing & insist that the article either
gets locked down or deleted. Which ignores the fact that if you get
sufficient attention, you will eventually become the subject of a
Wikipedia article. (Hmm. If we adopt this as an axiom like "Murphy's
Law", what should we call it? "Wikipedia's You Can't Hide Law"?)

And if one has sufficient attention, then it would benefit that person
to try to play nice with Wiipedia. Ask for help with editting that
article. Offer images under GFDL. Create some goodwill so that editors
who spend a lot of time will help watch over the article.

Because the only thing worse than someone succeeding in adding defamatory
information to your Wikipedia biography, is to find that it was a 100-word
stub, & the only edit was a sentence along the lines of "He's not as
handsome as his brother or his dog" to the article, & you're the first
person to notice in over 20 months.  (Now *that* would be a convincing
argument that the subject was non-notable.)

Geoff