On 2/22/06, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
I don't see a problem with an open and honest
request for factual
correction. We have always encouraged living people to engage with
the community in keeping their biographies factually accurate - just
not by actually editing them. Engage on the talk page, go to the
Office, whatever. And if they point out an error which can be
verified as an error, that's good. And if they dislike the fact that
verifiable but unflattering information is in there, maybe they should
have thought about that before they did whatever they did :-)
The way to get around NOR problems in this case might be to suggest
that we recommend that they create a webpage on their own webspace
that says "I have been characterized in X source [wherever Wikipedia
is getting the info] as having done Y. This is untrue, in reality I
only did Z."
Then, once that page is up (and stable), we change the article to say
"Source X says that Mr. SoandSo did Y. On his own webpage, Mr. SoandSo
later claimed that this was untrue, and that he had only done Z."
I think in that sort of article, that would be an acceptable form of
balancingout the NPOV without running into NOR problems. It also
serves our goal to encourage the people to take up the question of
truth with the original sources -- not Wikipedia's distillation of
them -- and that if they do so, we'll be happy to record that they
did.
Just a thought... obviously it would be a lot more work than most of
these people would be willing to do, but NOR is a Very Good Thing and
I don't see how any other approach would really get around that,
assuming the offending information is well-cited itself.
FF