I agree that having the subject of an article edit that article should be avoided - unfortunately some of the wikipedians (including Mr Wales*) have edited their own article so it sets a bad precedent. I would like to see those that edit their own article encouraged to request the changes on the talk page and allow others to make the changes. my 2 cents, Jim * If you review the history you can see that nearly all of the edits I refer to here were factual clarifications and clearly not imposing a particular POV; however, we should strictly follow this guideline regardless of the nature of the change (especially when it comes to describing the history of wikipedia and other notable people who are either directly associated or have made major contributions to wikipedia) in order to provide a proper example. On 11/10/05, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
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.
For instance, just yesterday I noticed that an anonymous contributor had repeatedly removed a piece from the article on a fairly well-known author. After several rounds of removing it, the anon created a userid and removed the info again, with an edit comment that the information was inaccurate. The username was clearly based on that author's name, so I contacted them asking if they really were the author in question or if they were a fan using the author's name. The author subsequently contacted me in email and verified their identity, and we discussed the issue; it turned out that the incident being removed was one where the author had been quoted in the press as having said things they insisted they had never said.
I'm working on a peaceful resolution of this, and I'm very hopeful that it can be achieved.
What concerns me is that for quite a few users, the very idea that a notable person was attempting to remove information from the article on themselves would have made them dig in their heels about Wikipedia's rights and freedoms, the information would have been kept in the article merely to spite the person, and no doubt threats of lawsuits and the like might have resulted. We should be aware that many times, if someone is attempting to change information in an article about themselves, it is because they honestly believe it to be inaccurate. Nutcases like Brandt aren't the norm.
-Matt _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
-- Jim (trodel@gmail.com) "Our love may not always be reciprocated, or even appreciated, but love is never wasted" - Neal A Maxwell ---Intersted in Gmail - let me know I have invites---