On 6/21/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
By "WP:V" I assume you mean the verifiability policy. Well in many
cases information about relatively private people is quite verifiable,
because it appears in medical case studies and in newspapers. A
person's name is splashed all over the newspapers because he survives
the Virginia Tech massacre. Do we put his name into the encyclopedia?
I think it's good that we recognise that there is an ethical question
involved in such an act. It isn't as neutral an act of cataloguing as
we sometimes like to pretend.
I'm not sure there's any "ethical issue" there at all. As you
stated,
those peoples' names are very well-known already. I would tend to agree
that we shouldn't present a "biography" of such since we can't present
a
complete one, but not even mentioning the names? That does indeed serve
an encyclopedic purpose-making things easier, for example, for a future
researcher who might be looking into the massacre, or wishes to follow
up. I would think that would outweigh any "ethical" considerations
of-what? Republishing already published information?
Our references contain the names, so future researchers can obtain
them. Meanwhile we're one of the most popular websites on the
internet so putting the names of those individuals here instead of
some obscure newspaper archive does raise ethical questions.