Lars Aronsson wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote
What makes you think people didn't lie?
I can only speak for the Swedish Who's who ("Vem är det"), which has been published 45 times between 1912 and 1999 (roughly every second year), with the 46th edition in 2007 (an 8 year gap and change of publisher, it was discontinued and then revived). I haven't heard of any cases of fraud.
Exactly, and it should be up to those paranoiacs who imagine a high level of fraud to show some evidence about its extent before they tar everything with the same brush of suspicion.
What I'm coming to is that Wikipedia might have to adopt the method of sending out forms to select people, asking for their biographic details (or for verification or denial of what's already in the Wikipedia article). That doesn't mean we should trust such autobiographic information blindly, but allow this input in a controlled form to make Wikipedia more complete without encouraging the uncontrolled editing of your own article.
I think that most who do respond will try to do so honestly. Verification would still be desirable, but we would start from an assumption of good faith.
- If we discover false claims or grave omissions in the received forms, how do we handle the next contact with that person?
False claims would make us suspicious of anything the person says. But what would be a grave omission if a specific question about something is not asked?
Ec