While I agree with you that B.P. does not deserve as much privacy as people who are merely annoying (everyone), note that the point of sex offender registries is not to punish gropers by dragging their names through the dirt worldwide, but rather to warn those who might come into contact with the gropers to be careful. So, you really don't need to know about them unless you do live in the same locale.
And, for the record, the first time a guy gropes me, I will slap him. Second time, I'll slap him harder, and so on. But I won't go and write an article on a high-Google-ranking site about him. Not that I'm saying the woman he groped wrote the article - I'm saying she herself might not want there to be an article on him, at least if she is anything like me, which she may not be.
On 18/09/2007, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
The 911 reference is to a woman, let's call her "lonely Aloha woman", who called 911 because she thought a deputy "was cute" and wanted him to come back to her house. Google "lonely Aloha woman" if you want the full story. Jimmy Wales used it on the mailing list as a strawman, saying that we should "leave the poor woman alone" and not have an article on her because we don't want that story to end up being permanently presented as the number one google hit for this "non-notable" person.
I call it a strawman because Jimmy was specifically using the hypothetical situation to attack me and my support of there being an article on B.P., and yet I don't think we *should* have an article on this woman and in fact I've always felt that personal privacy considerations should be taken into account when deciding on whether or not to cover something in Wikipedia.
I think it's clearly a sliding scale though, and on that scale I think clearly B.P. deserves the least personal privacy and some Wikipedian who was banned for pissing off a few admins deserves the most. The lonely Aloha woman also did something incredibly stupid, but I don't think that justifies having a Wikipedia article come up as the top Google result of a search for her name. At least call the article [[lonely Aloha woman]] if you insist on writing about it. And as far as I'm concerned I think Wikipedia's robots.txt should read "Disallow: /" (imagine all the useless arguments doing that would eliminate).