@EmperorNero,
It is not misleading nor is it wrong if you have the requisite knowledge to understand that they are really talking about Classical(philosophical) Liberalism. It is absolutely correct. If you read the entire article on Standford you will find that the sentence from wikipedia is reasonably accurate, from the article:
"1.1 The Presumption in Favor of Liberty
'By definition', Maurice Cranston rightly points out, 'a liberal is a man who believes in liberty' (1967: 459). In two different ways, liberals accord liberty primacy as a political value. (i) Liberals have typically maintained that humans are naturally in 'a
State of perfect Freedoma prioriFundamental Liberal Principle (Gaus, 1996: 162-166): freedom is normatively basic, and so the onus of justification is on those who would limit freedom, especially through coercive means. It follows from this that political authority and law must be justified, as they limit the liberty of citizens. Consequently, a central question of liberal political theory is whether political authority can be justified, and if so, how. It is for this reason that social contract theory, as developed by Thomas Hobbes (1948 [1651]), John Locke (1960 [1689]), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1973 [1762]) and Immanuel Kant (1965 [1797]), is usually viewed as liberal even though the actual political prescriptions of, say, Hobbes and Rousseau, have distinctly illiberal features. Insofar as they take as their starting point a state of nature in which humans are free and equal, and so argue that any limitation of this freedom and equality stands in need of justification (i.e., by the social contract), the contractual tradition expresses the Fundamental Liberal Principle.
(ii) The Fundamental Liberal Principle holds that restrictions on liberty must be justified, and because he accepts this, we can understand Hobbes as espousing a liberal political theory. But Hobbes is at best a qualified liberal, for he also argues that drastic limitations on liberty
can be justified. Paradigmatic liberals such as Locke not only advocate the Fundamental Liberal Principle, but also maintain that justified limitations on liberty are fairly modest. Only a limited government can be justified; indeed, the basic task of government is to protect the equal liberty of citizens. Thus John Rawls's first principle of justice: 'Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive system of equal basic liberty compatible with a similar system for all' (Rawls, 1999b: 220)."
Source:
Liberalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Every stance presented on that page argues for personal Liberty, they differ only in scope and implementation. The only thing that the wikipedia article can be criticized for is some degree of over simplification. The aim of liberalism is to assume that individual freedom is of great importance, and that it can be compromised only if one can successfully justify the compromise. Typically the compromise is struck only if a restriction on individual liberty prevents other more costly restrictions of liberty and life from taking place; e.g. disallowing the act of murder.
Stanford does elucidate the fact that modern leftist and Libertarian ideals share a common background and have been, in many cases, drawn from a shared assumption. The most striking differences are in the details, the implementation. The theories have a great deal in common, the practices do not. If one does not start with the assumption that personal liberty is the apex of importance, but simply accepts the conclusions of one branch of liberal philosophy without exploring the premises then it would be inappropriate to call oneself a 'liberal'. The prevalence of the misuse of the term refering to those who fall under that very category of ignorant policy pushers is at the root of the confusion and I think that it has caused some division amongst those who would otherwise be open to intelligent debate.
