Her legal name had appeared in some public court filings, and some user had added it to her Wikipedia page with the reference.
Someone else (purportedly one of her co-stars) had requested removal.
A Wikipedia editor then got involved, and refused to budge from the position the original actress was notable enough to merit inclusion of her legal name.
Cue months of back-and-forth deletions and reversions.
Finally, I think a year later, someone quietly edited the legal name out and it stuck.
Sometimes people with a little power are the greatest assholes. Probably because they sought the little power.
I don't know about this case, but it seems entirely reasonable that to argue for including the name, or not.
Plenty of public personas have aliases they wish to be known by, but their Wikipedia article prominently notes their real name.
So by definition it's not exposing any information you can't find in other public sources.
Whether it's notable and something that should be included is another matter.
In any case, I'm saying that if you look at the articles for Madonna, Bono, Jenna Jameson, Marilyn Manson etc. you'll find their real name displayed prominently.
We can't form our own opinion in this case, as the GP is deliberately keeping the specific article in question hidden.
But in general this seems like a thing two editors could reasonably disagree about.
For the section in question, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BLPPRIMARY
Unfortunately, it seems so ossified that that work can only be done within Wikipedia (notable article, standards, etc).
A far more reasonable approach would have been to have CommonPedia... and then regularly pull qualifying information into Wikipedia.
This is called "The Web". You’re free to write whatever you want, it’s just not on Wikipedia.
> it's not like they're limited by the size of a bound encyclopedia.
No, but articles still require maintainance, so it’s false to say that just because this is "in the cloud" you can have an infinite number of articles.