"It's not that simple. The problem is that dirt sells, so for any given interesting person, there is always dirt. Getting reliable sources to say anything else about the subject of the BLP is harder, because good news doesn't sell. So if you are a person who is prominent in a small community, and you get famous because of an exciting news story, you wind up with a BLP page that makes you look like a scumbag, and says absolutely nothing about whatever it was that got you prominent enough that a gossip story about you was able to make the news. I've seen this happen to a couple of prominent figures. It's unfixable, because a gossip column is more reliable than an organizational web page. Personally, I count myself lucky that I don't have a wikipedia biography."
Well said. This is very true, generally speaking, and one of the systemic problems with Wikipedia, or any encyclopedia that writes biographies on the basis of gossip rags.
In this case, however, it also seems that Wikipedia contributors may actually have gone slightly overboard in excluding positive material – Barry's philanthropic endeavours have attracted quite a bit of sympathetic coverage, little of which seems to be reflected in the article.
The question is not whether some of the bad stuff was true, it's whether it was unduly emphasised (at one point for example, an editor changed the infobox format to the one used for criminals, which does seem a bit malicious), and whether balancing coverage was excluded. I think the editors may have reacted to what they perceived as somewhat promotional edits, and decided to punish the biography subject. If so, that may not have been a good idea.
