Comments Elsewhere

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.