On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 6:42 AM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
2009/1/2 toddmallen toddmallen@gmail.com:
Actually, I do see it as a false dichotomy. We're presenting it as "rights" against publication of verifiable, reliable, already-published material. These rights do not exist. I do not have a right to tell you that you may not talk about me or publish information about me, provided what you say is true.
If I understand you correctly, you would be (theoretically) fine with me creating a wikipedia page of you and filling it with true information about you, including your social security number, bank account number, telephone number, mothers maiden name, address, entire sexual history, provided all of this can be said to be correct by a notable source and referenced correctly?
I'm assuming not, at least I hope not.
But in practice then, legally and morally and by wiki policy and guidelines, these rights to demand that information be removed do exist for certain classes of information.
So I think what we're really discussing here *which* kinds of personal information may be published in the wikipedia and under what circumstances.
-- -Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better.
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I would have a problem with that if all that information weren't already publicly available. On the other hand, if it had already been published on the front page of the New York Times, I probably wouldn't much care-that information would already be out, and I'd already be in the process of changing those numbers and the like. And sometimes sexual history -is- genuinely relevant to an article (see [[Monica Lewinsky]] or [[Gary Hart]] for examples).
Of course, a simple factual real name is a bit different than publishing someone's telephone number, SSN, or phone number, none of which I've ever seen in an article (at least not for very long). Nor do reliable sources tend to publish such things.
An accurate comparison would more be like saying that my real name is Todd Allen, were there someday to be an article on me. I would expect that such an article would have my real name in it, and you can see how little I mind if that's known. The rest is hyperbole, and no one is arguing to include such things. I can't think of a possible scenario in which someone's social security number or bank account number would be relevant to an article, nor can I think of any circumstances under which a reliable source would publish them. Names are not the same. "Who" is one of the 5 W's that is taught in elementary school writing. An article on a subject that does not answer that question is inherently lacking. The same is not true if it does not include their credit card number.
People are readily identifiable by the information given about them anyway. How hard is it to find the Star Wars kid's name, even from our article, where all the sources we use readily publish it, or a google search on the article title brings it right up? If something is in public already (which it by definition is, if reliable sources available to the public have published it), it is no longer private. You can say that's good, or bad, or simply inevitable, but it's still the fact, and to think we can stuff genies back in bottles (even provided that to do so would be desirable, an odd position for a project specifically dedicated to making information available to take) is monumental hubris. We're big, but we're not -that- big.
I don't want to see BLPs that protect this notion of privacy, that we should not make people identifiable, because in the end, such an article could say exactly nothing. Giving enough specifics to be worthwhile makes identifiability inevitable.