Anthere wrote:
And yes, your request was not a bug, it is something to be debated. Developers were correct in their answer ihmo. We should be very careful about that Robert.
I have tried to start the discussion about this issue in the past, but most places I made the request about the topic it became a dead issue with most people suggesting that it was a non-issue. In this particular instance with the Wikijunior Solar System (and moving on subsequently to other Wikijunior books like the Big Cats volume) I decided to "BE BOLD" and try to collect the information for that volume alone. On the Wikijunior Solar System side, there have been many contributions to this information, and I've had the notice up there requesting comments for at least two months now with absolutely no discussion what so ever. In this regard I am grateful that you are even asking about and questioning the request for this information. Seriously. At least there is a difference of opinion and now a serious discussion can take place rather than a one-sided discussion where nobody seems to care.
All I'm trying to do is collect what public information is already available for each of the authors listed. That is a problem sometimes with computer databases in that when the information is scattered around and not collected you don't think anything of it to mention personal details of your life, but when you actually see it gathered together in an easily searchable form you start to question the rationale of having that information widely available. Information about you is currently being kept by governments and private corporations all of the time, and legitimate social discussions do need to take place about how much privacy should we expect when we leave a public paper trail that can be researched and have data mining performed on that information.
If this is going to turn into a general discussion about how much people can do by trying to do data mining on Wikimedia projects, I welcome that sort of discussion. In this case, I'm doing data mining of authors on a particuar Wikiproject, trying to get information about the authors including their full real name, nationality, and other related information. Some of this I've been able to find through means other than a voluntary contribution of this information, including searching talk pages and user pages. Should I stop that sort of searching, even if I can find that sort of data in a "public" forum (like talk pages generally are)? Should the privacy policy be expanded to specifically prohibit this sort of data mining? I don't know the answers to these questions, but at least I'm doing this sort of research out in the open and in public. There is nothing stopping anybody else from doing this sort of research and keeping it for themselves either, or keeping it in a private database for some purpose that you may not appreciate or like.