Seth, I think you are notable enough for Wikipedia. I feel that the problem is more one of setting user expectations of articles rather than allowing subjects to opt-out.

As a person who has suffered multiple online defamations (some of which I have taken sucessful legal action against) I agree entirely with your post.

Wikipedia benefits from pages written about a person, but the person themselves suffers an imposed negative cost in worry, stress and constant vigilance.

Perhaps in the future everyone will be libeled, slandered and smeared for 15 minutes. The question is: do we have enough tools to counter it?

If you feel strongly about this, the way to do it might be by exploiting Wikipedia's openness and editing the article rather than asking for it to be deleted. You could simply replace the entire text with "Seth Finkelstein does not wish for a Wikipedia biography entry", for example. It'd get reverted, obviously, but if you (and a couple of helpers?) stuck it out through the edit wars for a week or two I think the message would get across.

As a postscript to the above: that would be a pretty horrible hack - applied vandalism, really - but I think it would be justifiable; more to the point, I can't see any alternative that would be more effective. I'm curious as to what a Wikipedian counter-argument would be. I suppose it could be argued that dead-tree encyclopedias aren't bound to remove content which displeases the people written about - but then, isn't openness & responsiveness part of what makes Wikipedia different?

(Blatant plug)

My thoughts of vandalism and wikipedia's version control system...
http://billpg.me.uk/2006/03/locking-wikipedias-stable-door.html

Enjoy.

Mr Finkelstein,

While the problem reported in those articles are real, you have to remember that there are many thousands of biographies on Wikipedia, and the vast majority have not had undetected vandalism persist for long periods. Because of these issues, Wikipedia's administrators and regular contributors are particularly sensitive to monitoring articles about living people, and have become increasingly strict about detailed sourcing for the contents of articles about them.

I have added your article to my "watchlist". Every time I visit Wikipedia, if the article has been changed, I will be notified.

Oh, and Phil's tactics are likely to get you and any comrades banned from editing Wikipedia, and the article protected from changes.

Robert - that's pretty much what I thought.

The question is, why is this a good thing? Why would you make a virtue of ignoring the wishes of the actual subject of an entry? I'm genuinely curious.

Phil,

The reason you would get banned is because you would be acting like a dick on computers that don't belong to you. That's not an appropriate way to deal with WP having policies that you don't like: don't disrupt Wikipedia to make a point.

Of course, that leaves open your other question, as to why WP has the policies that it does have, and whether it should have those policies or not. I think the short answer is that WikiPedia, like any other encyclopedia or print source, aims at providing information to its users, not at making the lives of its subjects easier. "Openness and responsiveness" are virtues insofar as they make it so that the stuff WikiPedia says can be audited by readers. They have nothing to do with giving some special control to the subject over what other people say about her or him.