[imajes]

Yeah, but if the user wasn't anonymous, he could have been contacted by the wikipedia admins and suggested that perhaps the information wasn't worthy of the public domain yet. Any reasonable person would understand the risk to the man's life and held back from posting it.

[frossie]

I agree that the fact that the user kept himself or herself anonymous is highly relevant to this story.

I understand that wikipedia wants to lower the barrier to entry by allowing anonymous edits, and I have sometimes made anonymous edits out of convenience, but personally if it was me and I had had two edits reversed I would have just logged on, left an eponymous message on the talk page saying "I am confused, I keep wanting to add this information, which does not violate the guidelines, and I keep getting locked out. Help?".

Then at least the people trying to protect the victim would have had a chance to put their case forward.

There is also evidence that kidnappers DO look online for information, I seem to remember a story about a journalist pointing to his Wikipedia entry to convince his kidnappers that he was Canadian, not American? British? (can't remember what the offending nationality was) and that proved to be a factor in his release.