[WikiEN-l] Dealing with people who object to articles on themselves

[Daniel R. Tobias]

I've been following a number of these disputes, where somebody 
objects either to the very fact of Wikipedia having an article on 
them, or to the content of the article, or to the fact that they 
don't have absolute veto power over it, or to basic aspects of the 
structure of Wikipedia (e.g., that anybody can come in and edit any 
article, and sometimes they may insert nasty, unjustified comments 
which stick around until somebody else removes them, and could be 
indexed or cached by search engines or scraped by mirror sites in the 
meantime).  While these people may have some philosophical points 
worth consideration, their method of pursuing them, by coming in and 
vandalizing their own article, making unreasonable demands that go 
against Wikipedia policy, and making legal threats, understandably 
leads to antagonistic battles.

Through all of this, our Fearless Leader Jimbo has taken a consistent 
position of being friendly and reasonable with all of these people, 
even if they don't act the same way to us.  He aims to convince them 
that their goals and ours are not irreconcilable, and we can all be 
better off with cooperation instead of warfare.  He's a better man 
than I; my emotional reaction to each of these cases has always been 
to feel like, "If that guy wants war, then war is what he should 
get!", and to want to get my adrenaline up and fight back as fiercely 
as the other guy, or fiercer.

With some reflection, once I'm calmed down, I see that Jimbo's 
position is actually not just good for his own karma; it really does 
work.  If you look over the articles involved in such controversies, 
they are almost without exception better off now than they were 
before the fighting started.  The assertions made in the articles are 
carefully sourced and referenced, the NPOV policy is scrupulously 
followed, and the articles are vigorously patrolled for vandalism, 
whether by the article subject and his/her friends, or by malicious 
enemies.  All of this is consistent with what Jimbo urges we all do 
with such articles; actually, it's what we should do with *all* 
articles, but it's urged in a particularly strong way for disputed 
ones such as these.  And, once people here get tired of feuding over 
the articles and get to work improving them, the result is a better 
encyclopedia.

But beyond this, in at least some of the cases, this method of 
dealing with them has actually brought the controversy to an end.  I 
observe at least one of the formerly hostile article subjects 
participating constructively in Wikipedia since his last block was 
lifted.  True, he's sometimes editing his own article, something 
generally frowned upon, but the edits have been reasonable, 
consisting of adding or modifying a source reference for greater 
accuracy.  He's no longer trying to delete all criticism or insert 
unsourced grandiose claims of his own feats, or to get the article 
deleted, or threatening legal action.  Hence, there seems to be a win-
win situation there; we've got a better article and one fewer people 
fighting us, while he's got a better article about himself that he is 
apparently satisfied with.

Some of the other cases don't have as satisfactory a resolution; some 
of their subjects remain blocked or banned for their activity, and/or 
are continuing to agitate against Wikipedia on outside sites.  
However, as far as I am aware, none of their legal threats has 
resulted in any actual legal action (perhaps Jimbo can correct me on 
this if I'm wrong), and all the articles seem reasonable and often 
quite favorable to their subjects, even if the subjects themselves 
still aren't happy about them.

So we seem to be doing something right; we should all try to stay 
calm and follow Jimbo's example.

There *are* some genuine legal, moral, and philosophical issues 
raised by these disputes; if something truly harmful (libel, slander, 
defamation, invasion of privacy) got into an article (perhaps by a 
vandal) and caused actual harm to somebody (not just the mostly 
hypothetical scenarios which tend to be spun by our attackers), then 
who, if anybody, would be held responsible?  How would such a thing 
be dealt with, without changing our site's very nature?

-- 
== Dan ==
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