Several times it has happened in the five years that I've been in-world, that people have contacted me to make changes in their own biographies, once they've gotten stymied in the process.
I have never once, not one single time, assumed they were the person in question. I always verify, independently who they are, through some official channel. For example, a radio host, can be verified by finding the official site for the radio station, checking for that person in their listings which frequently will have an "email me here" button and you can confirm the email addresses are the same or something like that.
There are always ways to fool any system, but doing nothing to verify identify, on controversial issues, is a good path to creating more problems, not fewer ones.
The funniest one, was when a BLP on a highly-charged pseudo-historian was in conflict and the subject contacted me, not to actually fix it, but to do genealogical research *for him*. I never really figured out whether he knew that I was the main culprit in making his biography neutral and forcing out the hagiographical details. But I made fifty bucks so I'm not complaining.
Will Johnson
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On Wed, 22 Apr 2009 WJhonson@aol.com wrote:
I have never once, not one single time, assumed they were the person in question. I always verify, independently who they are, through some official channel. For example, a radio host, can be verified by finding the official site for the radio station, checking for that person in their listings which frequently will have an "email me here" button and you can confirm the email addresses are the same or something like that.
That's fine.
But if you're going to go that route, that means that once you have verified their identity, you should indeed let them fix the incorrect claim in their biography.
That's not what you're saying. You're arguing for a policy that says that someone without a source can't correct errors about himself *at all*--whether you looked up the official site for his radio station or not. Verifying his identity is, in fact, completely irrelevant to this policy.