Jimmy Wales wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Court judgements (and, for that matter, court filings by the disputants, and even trial transcripts) are a matter of public record. This is an important component to maintaining the transparency of the judicial system. Privacy should not be a factor with this kind of material.
I think the point about privacy is that (as far as I know) there is a general consensus that someone sysematically going through court records to write articles about people who were convicted of drunk driving, or who were involved in a lawsuit, is a bad idea.
The lawsuit here is not a matter of having been so unfortunate as to be caught driving drunk pure and simple. The issues relate to how Langan presents himself to the world in relation to those issues and organizations which make him encyclopedic and/or notable. The references to the judgements may very well havew come from his opponents in the case, but that is not the same as systematically sifting through court records to find dirt on the guy
We need to have some kind of independent verification (i.e. WP:NOR) that the incident or lawsuit is notable and worthy of inclusion in an article, and that in the case of people of very minor notability, there is no very good reason to include it.
I've taken time to think about this before answering, and I keep arriving at the conclusion that it is not correct to suppress this information. I had never heard of Langan before this came up. Going through the long talk page attached to his article I get the impression that this guy is a streetfighter who is ready to do whatever it takes to win his point.
Thus far the discussion of this matter seems to have dragged in every major policy imaginable. I've already referred to privacy Court decisions are public documents. Even if they are not published they are at least available in court registries for those who may be interested or who want to make copies.
Whwther the decision is important enough to mention is a different issue. I would not want to mix that in with notability policy. Notability policy has a very high degree of subjectivity, and traditionally relates to whether we should have an article at all. Expanding such a policy to the point where it is an argument for including varous bits of data within an article gives that already overworked policy too much work.
It has also been mentioned that we should consider the policies on Biographies of Living Persons. This policy is rightly there so that we can better avoid untruths about living person. Incidentally to that we also avoid lawsuits for libel. Langan needs to know that citing a judge's decison is not libellous unless the citation grossly distorts the decision. The point here is that the fact of a legal decision, and what it says is verifiable.
NPOV has not apparently been violated. If there are errors of interpretation they can be fixed in the spirit of NPOV. A judge's decision is by it's very nature NPOV; it's a judges's job to distill the arguments of the parties to come up with a fair judgement. We can examine a judge's decision in the hopes of derving an even more neutral result, but in the absence of provable bias the onus is on those raising questions to point out errors. Langan appears to object to the fact that the default judgement was granted ex parte. The natural presumption in a default judgement is that the defendant does not really care to defend himself, and that he has no case. He generally has ample opportunity to respond, and in this regard it differs significantly from other ex parte actions.
Finally, is the information about the court case original research? I think that this concept has migrated significantly from its original intent of keeping crackpot theories manageable. When we run around in circles trying to determiine whether a source is primary or secondary I really don't think we accomplish anything. Saying that we cannot accept information contained in a priimary source until it has been properly distorted by a secondary source does not strike me as a fair path to an accurate article. A secondary source must still properly reflect its own sources, and a dilligent researcher will make certain of that.
I think that some mention of the legal actions is properly included in the article, though I hesitate to say how much.
Ec