On Wed, Apr 15, 2009 at 9:55 AM, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.comragesoss%2Bwikipedia@gmail.com
wrote:
On Tue, Apr 14, 2009 at 10:20 PM, Anthony wikimail@inbox.org wrote:
I'm sure they'd be happy to delete a biography upon request.
This has been an issue in the past. They deleted the userpage of an early heavy contributor who then left the project. But they realized that, because they vest authority not strictly in sources but also in the expertise of the contributors, it's necessary to retain at least a basic biography for anyone who has made non-trivial contributions.
That is an interesting point in its own right, but I was thinking more about the person who put in an application without realizing their bio would be made public. Presumably they'd realize this before making lots of non-trivial contributions.
As an obligatory on-topic comment, I think that leads to one of the major problems with wiki encyclopedias in general (and, to a lesser extent, copyleft in general), at least for people contributing under their real names. Once you've released your writing, it can be "edited mercilessly" in ways which are directly counter to your intent, and you're left with the choice between abandoning credit for your work and being considered responsible for the modifications of others (or, in the case of Citizendium, you're forced to choose the latter).
The GFDL attempted to provide "a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others", which is mentioned in the preamble, by maintaining a history section. But when the number of revisions to a single article reaches in the hundreds or the thousands, it doesn't work so well, and if you want to try to allow for offline use, it gets even worse.
I hope this gets solved some day, but I'm afraid it's just something we're going to have to accept.