On 6/21/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@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.