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Wikipedia is built to resist silencing—yet for LGBTQ+ people, and trans people especially, its core policies can inflict the opposite harm: forced visibility. Verifiability and notability rules can turn a single news mention into a permanent, searchable record of someone's sexuality or birth name, while the conflict-of-interest policy bars the very person most affected from correcting it. The subject's own testimony ranks below secondary sources—so the reporter who outed someone is deemed more authoritative about their identity than they are. This talk argues that COI policy conflates two different things: a subject's stake in their achievements, where neutrality matters, and their epistemic authority over their own identity—name, gender, disclosure—which should never be treated as a conflict. By examining how different language editions handle gender identity and biographies of living people, this talk asks how a system built to reveal might come to recognize a person's authority over when they are seen.
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