2008/4/22 Peter Ansell ansell.peter@gmail.com:
If the article is properly sourced then all of the opinions and facts expressed in the article are derived from outside sources so they are not being harmed by unique information in wikipedia, just their perception of wikipedia being more influential than scattered news articles and books. If wikipedia doesn't say anything new any harm due to the compilation of facts is immaterial IMO. Unless a court rules that random facts can't be combined in properly sourced secondary/tertiary sources due to the effect of the combination alone then they have no case.
For the usual case, it's not so much "they have no case" as "that's not such a good article, and while being firm in our neutrality we shouldn't be dicks about it." Hence the WP:BLP rule about the facts being of note themselves. (e.g. minorly-notable physicist who had a messy divorce - messy divorce details may be documentable, but they're not relevant to what he's famous for and no reader would care, unless the messy divorce itself was notable.) We get too many BLPs where someone mistakes Wikipedia for a repository of investigative journalism and throws in material that really doesn't belong in a good article.
- d.