Peter Mackay wrote:
Some public information, such as contained in registers of sex offenders or sale prices on house transfers, is generally relatively difficult to find and search. Sure, it's public info, but it's not readily available.
Having a Wikipedia article - a notorious Wikipedia article - is a different thing. For one thing, it will tend to rank high on a Google search, whereas that Ohio register doesn't seem to be at all prominent.
Are you at all familiar with the subject we're discussing? Have you actually tried searching Google for "Brian Peppers"? Information on him is quite readily available, quite apart from any obscure sex-offender registry. Wikipedia is not even the highest-ranked result (snopes.com is), and there are *161,000* hits. It's not as if Wikipedia pulled some obscure sex offender out of a registry and catapulted him to notoriety---he was catapulted to notoriety by fark.com, somethingawful.com, ytmnd.com, and various other high-traffic places on the internet, and we just reported that fact.
The reason the subject of the article was in WP is not because of his crime(s), but because of his appearance. To my mind, by including the article, we are not presenting a professional face to the world.
Neither of those is the reason. The subject of the article is in WP for the same reason [[en:Star Wars kid]] is: because he gained notoriety as the result of an internet fad.
And saying that the subject is now notorious and therefore notable is a circular argument.
It's not circular at all. If Wikipedia had made him notable, that would be circular. However, he became notable through no action of our own, and now we're documenting it, like we document everything people might look for information on.
-Mark