[WikiEN-l] Defamation of biographees

[Rolf Lampa]

Hi all,

I have a friend, Mats Molén, a creationist and a part time teacher in 
(public) school in Sweden, and also working in his own creation museum 
(and no, not the size of the creation museum in the US).  My errand is 
about an "invective" picture of Mats Molén (there's an article about 
Mats Molén in the Swedish WP since he's a well known author of a 
"classical" book (well, in Sweden) about the natural sciences which is 
critical about the evolution paradigm. Guess if Mats Molén is liked by 
all geologists and evolutionists in Sweden?!

Mats has a very kind and compassionate personality though, but such 
doesn't "count" in all contexts... =). Mats actually taught evolution 
before writing the book. Not after, though.

However, it seems like a young student found it being a great idea to 
take a not-so-perfect-photo of my otherwise not-so-bad-looking friend:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mol_n.jpg

 From the picture it looks like the picture is taken in a classroom in a 
school in Umeå, Sweden (link to map) 
<http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=sv&q=Ume%C3%A5,+Sweden&ie=UTF8&ll=71.357067,3.164063&spn=37.915819,105.644531&z=3&om=1>. 
This picture was once added to an article about MM in the Swedish WP as 
a, say, "complement" to the original picture in the article. May I 
suggest that this very picture isn't very "Informative"? Obviously the 
picture was added in order to make Mats look silly.

I talked to the administrators of the Swedish Wikipedia about removing 
the picture from the article (this was now a while ago), and they did. 
Except for some misunderstanding of my intents they also found the 
reasons for publishing the picture in the article being... um, 
questionable.

So, at last the picture was removed from the article. But long before 
that I had already requested that someone remove the picture from the 
archive, but I might have done something wrong in the request process 
(all those templates to create & confirm), because it hasn't been 
removed yet. The picture is still in the archive:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mol_n.jpg

(And yes, of course I can't resist mocking him for this silly picture! =)

Mats Molén wrote to me today and was a bit sad (again) about this 
picture. It's still there, and it starts to feel kind of "sticky". I 
know that Mats sees no problem with being criticized for his views and 
claims, and he's of the kind of people which is prepared to publicly try 
to answer concrete criticism of his views and claims, simply because 
that's what he expects from others making bold claims.

Both I and Mats Molén actually do appreciate Wikipedia, although not 
entirely without reservations (this may surprise some since we are what 
many of you would call fundamentalist Christians). We really do think 
that WP is in part useful. We don't like everything we see in it when 
browsing the articles, but we also see value in it.

Now I ask of you in this group to help making the value in WP to appear 
better. It is not a good thing if biographies and media repositories in 
WP are used in hate campaigns against individuals. What makes WP unique 
in this respect is of course that people tend to perceive info in an 
encyclopedia as "facts". It really "clashes" with stupid pictures like 
the one at hand.  So, for WP's sake, and for my friend's sake, can you 
please assist me in removing the nonsense-picture* of Mats Molén from 
Wikimedia commons?

Best regards,

// Rolf Lampa, Sweden

[*] Picture suggested for removal:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Mol_n.jpg