On 5/5/05, David Gerard fun@thingy.apana.org.au wrote:
This legal talk is entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand ... There is an encyclopedic interest issue at stake. Will relevant
information be removed from an article because an exposed fraud's ego is bruised?
David, regarding the issue of encyclopedic interest: public figures are treated very differently by journalists, particularly in the U.S. where libel law is quite different when it comes to public figures, but also in other countries where there's no distinction in law. Public figures are seen to some extent as fair game, whereas the right of private individuals to retain their privacy and dignity is respected by good journalists, so even if some demonstrably true titbit comes their way, they'll hesitate to use it if it would damage a private person, provided there's no public-interest issue at stake.
Wikipedia has become an incredibly powerful medium but we don't have any kind of an ethical code for cases like this. We have no lawyers, no heirarchy of editors, no fact-checking procedures: none of the infrastructure of large, powerful news organizations, and yet we have arguably as much power as some of them. It's a sobering thought. All I'm arguing is that we should take that power seriously, and never abuse it; and if a private person complains that we have, where there's no public-interest issue involved, we should err on the side of caution and kindness, because we lose nothing by doing that, but the person being criticized might lose a lot if we don't (regardless of the details of this particular case: I'm talking generally).
Sarah