Someone has posted a question about WP:OUTING. We are currently dealing with a copyright issue ( a textbook has copied liberally from Wikipedia without proper attribution and the author claiming the work as their own ). Before we inform the publisher however we need to make sure that the author of the book is not a Wikipedia editor who wrote the original content and than released it under a different license. In this instance this was not the case.
However is the simply fact of attempting to verify that an author is not a Wikipedian considered WP:OUTING? Not attempting to verify it before informing the publisher and amazon however would be unethical as we may harm someones career and need to make sure we are correct. Other peoples thoughts?