People often have very good reasons to pick the labels they do, but those reasons are often fairly nuanced. The only way to respect that nuance is to honor the label. And you don't even have to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to run into relabelling.
Whether that relabeling is done by a Pew poll that labels you as a religious person because you attended a single religious service one year because you were curious about an unknown slice of culture, or by a friend trying to soften your image by labeling you as something they think is less offensive, it's infuriating.
I can't imagine how frustrating this has to be for someone who actually has the burden of having a voice that people are interested in hearing; when someone reduces a careful and intimate response to a fairly personal question to not only a single word, but the wrong word.
The general thrust of Wikipedia policy is that on religion, sexuality and other similar issues, self-identity trumps all.
We've had all sorts of problems with this: there was an actor a few years ago who gave an interview to a British gay magazine talking about how he was out as gay. But then the prospect of him becoming big in Hollywood came along and his agent wanted to erase this, or sort of have it fade away into ambiguity. What do you do in those kinds of circumstances?
The flip side of that is I've cleaned up horrible biographies written by people who absolutely loathe particular people without even a faint hint of neutrality.
Why can't the people be simply exactly and fully quoted instead of having something else put in their mouth?
Why can't we see Einsteins quote from 1954 in the main article about him
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. These subtilised interpretations are highly manifold according to their nature and have almost nothing to do with the original text"
instead of referring to "pantheistic" "Spinoza's God" out of his letter 1929 to interpretations of which he referred also in 1954:
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
Even where the quotes exist (the separate article) they are intentionally shuffled to appear that he at the end it's important that he believed in "Spinoza's God" (by placing that quote after the later ones and hiding the context).
The answer is: those that win edit wars are religious, and they try to obscure his words "The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses." If the "smartest man" says that, and they do believe in God, they feel "stupid," and they simply can't accept that, facts be damned.
Still, the subject here isn't the labeling and certainly not the emotional response to it, the subject is intentional manipulation of the articles where instead of using exact quotes of people and presenting the context something opposite is written as "interpretations" which are claimed to mean "the same" by the trolls who introduce them.
It's absurd that Neil DeGrasse Tyson's (or Einstein's) full exact sentences can't be quoted in the Wikipedia article about him exactly only when it's about the contested topics.
People often have very good reasons to pick the labels they do, but those reasons are often fairly nuanced. The only way to respect that nuance is to honor the label. And you don't even have to be Neil deGrasse Tyson to run into relabelling.
Whether that relabeling is done by a Pew poll that labels you as a religious person because you attended a single religious service one year because you were curious about an unknown slice of culture, or by a friend trying to soften your image by labeling you as something they think is less offensive, it's infuriating.
I can't imagine how frustrating this has to be for someone who actually has the burden of having a voice that people are interested in hearing; when someone reduces a careful and intimate response to a fairly personal question to not only a single word, but the wrong word.
It makes me sick.