On 23/06/2008, WJhonson(a)aol.com <WJhonson(a)aol.com> wrote: Perhaps there could be a first time. But that's not what we're talking about, we're talking about what policies the wikipedia *should* have. We're also talking about cases like the Star Wars kid where adding his name really adds very little to the article, and in fact helps people track him down in real life. Saying that the wikipedia is part of the press is not in any way accurate. The press don't necessarily have a permanent page on every story they've ever covered, indexed by google. But the wikipedia does. The indexing and searching makes a huge difference to the issues of potential privacy and harassment. The press may easily decide to archive or prevent indexing of stories older than a certain date (and in my experience they frequently seem to be doing that to some degree), but the wikipedia *cannot* do that. These properties are an essential difference between a news organisation and an encyclopedia, and need to be taken into account when the policies are drawn up. You can't force a genie back into a bottle, but in many cases the genie will tend to fade once released, and this should not be prevented by the wikipedia. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly imperfect world things would be a lot better.