Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 6/21/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/21/07, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
I think this is true only if you think that information is neutral, irrespective of the form of presentation. Why would I not want to put my son's excellent academic record, or my beautiful and talented daughter's photograph, on a notice on every telegraph pole in my neighborhood? I've nothing to be ashamed of, I'm a proud father, and they're both adults, so why don't I just go ahead and do that?
You would probably run into your local anti-littering laws. There would also be various issues of image rights by WP:V should keep wikipedia covered in that respect.
Questioning the legality is avoiding the question. I don't put that information on my web page, either, and that's completely legal.
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.
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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?