On 28 Jan 2007 at 01:40, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:

I think that we need to establish a right of defence or rebuttal (or whatever we want to call it). This would allow anyone who is directly affected by the article a place to defend his point of view. This could probably be done in a template that is linked from the page in question. The person or company affected would have the exclusive right to make substantive edits to that template. The result would be a section that is the person's view on the issue; if they want to make a radical departure from the truth that would be their right within that context. If the subject tries to put the same information in the main body of the article that would be subject to the usual meat-grinder rules.

This strikes me as a really bad idea, going completely against the core NPOV policy, as well as the principle that nobody owns any part of any article. Why should any part of main article space (or templates included in it) be controlled by outside people and used to present their (perhaps distorted) view of reality? That's what the subjects' own (personal, organizational, and corporate) web space is for. Web hosting is really cheap these days, and when you've got your own site you can use it to promote your own POV as much as you want. Then, if you're the subject of a Wikipedia article, it's reasonable for that article to have an external link to your site (including its anti-Wikipedia rants, if that's part of the site's content). This works out reasonably well for everybody; the subject's POV is easily available in exactly the form the subject wants it to be, but it's also clearly at arm's-length from Wikipedia itself, which remains in an NPOV style.