Steve Summit wrote:
Mark Ryan wrote:
With the high profile cases where administrators have been stalked in real life as a result of personally identifiable information they post on the wiki, I feel it's mad for people to post their real names, let alone photos of themselves, names of loved ones or photos of loved ones. Sure, if you stay out of trouble on the wiki the chances of such a thing happening is pretty slight, but there's plenty of nutcases out there to go around.
I don't know Lara and I haven't followed this thread, but I would speculate that her attitude might be similar to mine: I refuse to grant those nutcases that much power. Some tiny number of them exist, who have perpetrated some tiny number of (albeit high-profile) atrocities, and now suddenly nobody else on the entire planet can post pictures of their children to the net? No; I defy that lopsided capitulation.
That's exactly my view. It's not that difficult to find out information about me. I've been a loud mouth on the internet for 10 years now. I've had plenty of threats for real life violence, yet not really much from Wiki, and I've always used my real name and stated where I'm from, posted my pictures and my age. I'm an open book in person and online. So far, it's not caused me problems. Jimbo certainly has his share of nutjobs pissed at him, I'm sure. Everyone knows his name, where he lives, has images of himself up. Public records would most likely reveal to anyone curious enough what his address is. Regardless, it's cake to find out where he works. We write articles of controversial people and post their images, so what's the difference for me to post my image? That's careless of me to show my image, but not careless of Wikipedia to do it to others? I can't agree.
Perhaps I'm fearless in this regard, but I'm tired of hearing these horror stories of nutjobs taking info from editor's pages and effing up their world. Can I get a link to some story where someone suffered a tragic circumstance from posting their name or image on wiki? That'd be appreciated.
Lara