Another follow-up:
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Benjamin Lees wrote: "No, French Christians are just tagged with
subcategories of Category:French Christians. The "requiring diffusion"
category that you complain of is in fact a way to tell editors that
pages in the category should really be in subcategories instead."
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Aha! You're right, I had not realized that "diffuse" (disseminate/spread
widely) was being used as specialized en-wiki-jargon for
"subcategorize". It might be wise to give that hidden category a more
descriptive name.
I looked into one of the many BLP entries with an unscourced
Category:French Jews tag, and found a review of a book they wrote. In
that book, the person stated that while they had a Jewish mother, they
did not consider themselves Jewish.
Given that the category French Jews contains more members than the
category French Roman Catholics, and that there are living people
included in both categories... I seriously wonder what it is that
motivates folks to anonymously tag others in this way (i.e. whether they
want to be tagged or not).
The Library of Congress, the BNF, Wikidata, etc. don't label people
according to religion, unless their notability is due specifically to
their religion (e.g. Alfred Dreyfus, Maimonides, etc.). On en.wp people
being labeled as Jewish/Catholic, etc. tend to be industrialists,
politicians, journalists, bankers etc. I don't think this is "best
practice" and I'm afraid I do not agree that en.wp is mostly "getting it
right" with regard to this specific question. Fr.WP and Wikidata are
doing much better.
The relevant section on "data subject" privacy rights in the GDPR (in
English) is based on the 1978 French law I cited earlier (though it has
become more restrictive since -- see below). As David Gerard noted, it
is quite likely that this affects not only Wikipedians (who can petition
to have libel/slander concerning their *online identity* (cf. definition
of data subject) removed from (inter alia) block logs), but also the
*content* of biographies of living people in the encyclopedia.
== GDPR (Article 9)==
*Processing* of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin,
political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, or trade union
membership, and the processing of genetic data, biometric data for the
purpose of uniquely identifying a natural person, data concerning health
or data concerning a natural person's sex life or sexual orientation
shall be prohibited.
======
As one who has contributed to the projects since 2006, I am posting this
here not because I wish to sow dissent, but because I think some quick
thinking and corrective action is needed.
sashi