Fred Bauder wrote:

It's the same problem we have with Biographies of Living Persons. We don't want to republish bullshit. Especially after we've clearly identified it.

Fred

The argument for the status-quo here seems to be "there's a lot of necessarily confidential discussion on the list"

But if you read back to my opening post, you'll see I accept that. There ought to be a closed list for confidential information to be circulated and appropriately commented upon. I'm not questioning that.

Not knowing what's on the list, perhaps there's a hell of a lot more "necessarily confidential" stuff than I ever guessed. I'm certainly not questioning what I'm being told in that regard. And I don't want to undermine this important facet of arbcom.

But my concern was with:

a. the archives: how useful are they (in fact not theory), compared to the potential for future harm they might cause?

b. any discussions about established users that have no need for privacy and could perfectly well be held in a readable list (or, better, on wiki). Now, I need to make an apology here - I've been assuming that the list is used for discussion that would not fall under the heading of "necessarily confidential". I'm happy to be told otherwise.

Question: Have the closed lists been used for the discussion of cases where there is no confidential information or privacy concerns? (I am NOT asking for details here. I'm NOT hunting for offenders or victims!). If the answer is no, I'll drop the whole thing.

Doc