Daniel Brandt is far from the first subject of a Wikipedia article to come along, find the article, and try to 'fix' it, edit it, delete it, or even boost themselves on it. And he won't be the last. As Wikipedia becomes more and more in the public eye, and as well-known people become more and more familiar with online things, we'll see it quite often.

We should be more prepared for this. Do we even have a page to point people at if they are themselves the subject of a Wikipedia article, explaining how Wikipedia works when it comes to biographies of living persons, and how they should engage with Wikipedia to improve articles on themselves? If not, we should.

We should also try and interact better ourselves with these people, and recognise that in most cases their intentions are not evil. They simply don't understand Wikipedia or the way it works, and thus misread and misinterpret what's going on.

[snip]

-Matt

I spent a considerable amount of time helping physicist Jack Sarfatti with precisely the same issue. He got banned twice before he got the hang of it. I used the telephone to verify his identity and also clue him in. He didn't realize that Usenet newsgroup customs do not apply to Wikipedia. After a couple of false starts, he got with the program and the [[Jack Sarfatti]] article is stable - with [[user:JackSarfatti]] contributing as a peer.

I spent so much time on this, because like Matt I am looking ahead to the future. We are "merely" a top-40 web site. What will happen when we begin to challenge Google, or network TV or major newspapers as "the place where people come for timely, reliable information"?

I'm planning to give a talk at Wikimania in Boston next summer (July or August 2006) on the topic, "Harmonious online interactions as a key to creating a high-quality collaborative product".

Uncle Ed