On 11/15/05, Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu wrote:
But what of when the edit is of merit? Are the most qualified primary sources disqualified from editing the Wikipedia article? Need a primary source published her first person claim elsewhere before it can bear upon the Wikipedia article?
I've never liked [[WP:AUTO]] myself. I would be inclined to let article subjects edit the articles about themselves in the same way that anyone else is, perhaps held to a higher standard on attributing every assertion to a verifiable outside source and writing neutrally.
Sure, they can leave notes on the talk page. Which for a major celebrity is great, as plenty of people will be watching or otherwise interested in the page. But for some of these minor figures who stumble across their entries, this may be the only attention the article gets for a long while. It may also be one of the only sources of information about them on the web, and probably the most prominent -- first Google hit on their names, etc. -- and to say "no, you can't edit this article, you have to let wrong information sit there until someone bothers to come by to fix it" doesn't seem quite right, and doesn't seem like the way to establish goodwill.
As Matt posted, the nutcases aren't the norm, and they can be dealt with for the misbehaviors that make them come off as batshit crazy rather than writing about themselves. Most are reasonable people who happen to quite reasonably not want falsehoods spread about them on a top-40 website (or anywhere, really), and are just not familiar with the way Wikipedia works enough to realize that everything must be cited and NPOV. I don't see much harm in letting them edit on themselves with a little guidance, some strong prodding to cite sources, and a caution that they don't have any more authority over the content of the article than any other editor. Still vastly preferred for others to edit instead, of course, but sometimes no one else really takes enough interest.
-Kat [[User:Mindspillage]]
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