From: Jimmy Wales Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 10:27 AM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [WikiEN-l] Articles about ourselves
There are verifiable facts about me, news reports and what-not, but I would prefer if there were no article about me, as a matter of modesty and good taste. I don't see any reason for us to have a hard-and-fast rule about this, but would like to encourage a social meme of similar modesty from other contributors.
At a very minimum, it seems most tasteful for anyone about whom we do have an entry to recuse themselves from working on it.
I think it's reasonable to discourage entries about contributors, but I think it's unreasonable to expect people to recuse themselves from working on their own entries. We don't generally expect people to recuse themselves from areas in which they are experts. We should, however, expect people to be rational and impersonal when working on their entries...that is, be held to the same standards of verifiability and respect for others' edits.
One question: why is this on the wikien list and not general wikipedia list? Are we trying to establish different mores and guidelines on all the wikipedia language versions?