No big point here or great moral, just an interesting set of observations and viewpoints.

Today I had the opportunity to interview Charlie Leduff. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, formerly of the New York Times. He's an all-around interesting fellow (although I think his choice of facial hair leaves something to be desired.)

He's got a Wikipedia bio, as well (link), and, having no idea who he was beyond the body of work I'd quickly assembled and read, quickly stumbled across the page after a cursory google search (third result after his personal site).

The Bio has a fairly lengthy "Controversies" section, which has the basic general claims (all sources, although to the strength of those sources I leave you to decide):
*LeDuff has plagiarized work.
*He has pursued or practiced sloppy/yellow journalism

Naturally, I was interested in asking him about this. I asked him if he realized he had a Wikipedia page, and he confirmed this; he was also aware of what was said about him. His response, however, was that while completely wrong, he could care less about what was published there as as to the in-his-view poor journalists who wrote the offending material, he'd get them in his next book (there was a lot more profanity involved, but that's the gist.)

It's hardly saying that the BLP problem can be laughed off by its subjects, but in the face of the usual horror stories, it's an interesting contrast.

Well, there is always the opposite situation like this horrible BLP that makes up awards for starting perfume schools and claims about working at a university with not one thing but the fact that he has a company of 12 people actually coming back as being legitimate. It is all a fanciful puff piece put on the French wiki and translated to English to probably promote his website creating company.

Having sourced about 200 of these in the past month or so, it seems like the biggest problem with some of them is that there's a bunch of non-notable puff pieces (about 4% in the 200) or straight up copyvios (about 5%). There was no straight up vandalism and only one or two "controversial" statements not backed by facts. But these were mostly non-American, non-English BLPs.

Puff pieces are more numerous than hatchet jobs, but that doesn't make them the greater problem.

Agreed.

The good thing about puffery is that it is generally obvious, even to a reader who knows little about the subject. The same is not true of the hatchet job.

If anything, I'd say the vast majority of BLP subjects are like this - willing to laugh off minor (or even fairly major) falsehoods, inconsistencies, and omissions as long as the article is kept and their livelihoods are reasonably secure in spite of them.

What's more, I believe Wikipedians understand this, for the most part - the way to maintain the cachet value of a Wikipedia BLP in spite of low "notability" standards seems to be to deflect the objections most people might otherwise have to them, by consistently agreeing with the notion that Wikipedia is unreliable and not to be taken seriously. If it doesn't look official, with formal review and systemic quality-control, then the perception is that it's more like a fan-site page, and everybody likes having fans. Some people even like having enemies, as long as someone is paying attention to them.

I know this is all counter-intuitive, but in addition to that, Wikipedians try to maintain the public perception (which is somewhat justified, for now at least) that BLP article subjects have little or no control over the content, so that most subjects can simply throw up their hands and say, "Oh, that site is a joke anyway, so who cares?" That means fewer complaints and/or calls for legislative changes. Meanwhile, those who really need privacy, a clean reputation, or low public visibility in order to survive and/or be successful can be treated as an "hysterical" minority, who are all "weird" because they're not behaving like most of the other subjects.

The other thing to bear in mind, IMO, is that the Wikipedia BLP problem isn't a menace to civil discourse simply because people can anonymously add defamatory content; it's a menace because some people have a real need to constantly monitor articles about them for defamatory content - a burden they might prefer not to have. But as is often the case, the majority's needs (or lack thereof) become a kind of tyranny, even though most of the people in this particular majority have no idea that this is even going on.

100% true. The myth of the dangerous promotional piece is one of the greatest reasons for the failure to take reasonable BLP action.