[WikiEN-l] BLPs: Wikipedia entry nearly scuppers rugby player's career

[WJhonson at aol.com]

In a message dated 10/2/2008 7:13:37 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,  
snowspinner at gmail.com writes:

Yeah,  because Wikipedia works much better when it can behave more   
sociopathically.>>
---------------
Or others would call this "normative".
Doctors use "do no harm".  Writers do not use this.
 
It is the norm in writing biographies, that you in fact include things  which 
could "harm" the person in some way.
For example, right now I'm reading the book on the Johnson&Johnson will  
contest.  In that book, they go into details about events that transpired  in the 
newspapers 20 years earlier.  I'm sure everyone at the time had  forgotten 
these things.  They were front-page news when they  occurred.
 
So the author is "dredging up" if you will, things forgotten, and the fact  
that anew people are reading or remembering these old negative events could  
"harm" the person in today's world where most people don't know it.
 
If a modern biographer covered those details up simply because people had  
"forgotten" them, they would be laughed out of the club.  It is simply not  the 
way writers write.  Hagiographers, now that's a different story.
 
Remembering that "investigative journalists" include confrontation and  
shock, biographers merely repeat and present.  In  addition investigative 
journalists tend to only present a tiny slice of a  person's life, biographers try to 
present the entire life.   They are  not the same thing.
 
That doesn't mean that biographers cause no harm.  Because they  do.  And we 
need to follow the norms of that occupation, not the norms of  some other 
occupation.
 
Will Johnson



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