Peter Mackay wrote:
Some public information, such as contained in registers
of sex offenders or
sale prices on house transfers, is generally relatively difficult to find
and search. Sure, it's public info, but it's not readily available.
Having a Wikipedia article - a notorious Wikipedia article - is a different
thing. For one thing, it will tend to rank high on a Google search, whereas
that Ohio register doesn't seem to be at all prominent.
Are you at all familiar with the subject we're discussing? Have you
actually tried searching Google for "Brian Peppers"? Information on him
is quite readily available, quite apart from any obscure sex-offender
registry. Wikipedia is not even the highest-ranked result (
snopes.com
is), and there are *161,000* hits. It's not as if Wikipedia pulled some
obscure sex offender out of a registry and catapulted him to
notoriety---he was catapulted to notoriety by
fark.com,
somethingawful.com,
ytmnd.com, and various other high-traffic places on
the internet, and we just reported that fact.
The reason the subject of the article was in WP is not
because of his
crime(s), but because of his appearance. To my mind, by including the
article, we are not presenting a professional face to the world.
Neither of those is the reason. The subject of the article is in WP for
the same reason [[en:Star Wars kid]] is: because he gained notoriety as
the result of an internet fad.
And saying that the subject is now notorious and
therefore notable is a
circular argument.
It's not circular at all. If Wikipedia had made him notable, that would
be circular. However, he became notable through no action of our own,
and now we're documenting it, like we document everything people might
look for information on.
-Mark