On Thu, 16 Apr 2009, James Farrar wrote:
(b) Sanger didn't post to the list to improve Wikipedia; he posted here to bitch about Wikipedia and Jimbo Wales, not necessarily in that order.
The same can be said of an ordinary BLP question. Most people who want to correct BLPs about themselves don't want to improve the encyclopedia; they just want to protect their own interests. We listen to them anyway.
But correcting a falsehood does improve the encyclopedia (even if that's not the "ordinary BLP" complainant's motivation).
That's true if the BLP complaint is factual, but there are BLP rules beyond that (like the one about not disparaging our subjects). Of course, you can say that anything which follows a Wikipedia rule must of necessity improve the encyclopedia, or else we wouldn't have the rule, but that makes the phrase merely a tautology.
I don't believe Sanger truly cares how Wikipedia describes him with respect to its foundation. He just wants to bitch. There's a big difference between your "ordinary BLP question" and this case.
He obviously is claiming that things which we say are true, aren't. Even in the non-article case, where he objects to the factual content of proclamations by us instead of articles by us, this is something we should pay attention to.