On 11 April 2011 16:04, Alison M. Wheeler wikimedia@alisonwheeler.com wrote:
Every individual is entitled to keep their private life exactly that, and where such online persona(s) are exist and are attributable to that private life I do not believe voters or other WM-related people have any right to know about them when they would not have any impact upon their ability to perform the tasks they are seeing. To give a few examples what about where someone suffers from depression so has an online identity which they use to seek mutual support from others? Where they are GBLT but would lose their employment or family if it were to become public so use an additional persona online? Where they have a blogging identity which 'whistleblows' on a business they are associated with (eg police, ambulance, etc) where the same could happen?
There are many other use cases for online anonymity too which are completely valid and would not impact on their ability to work for WMUK or the WM projects generally. We should not be forcing such capable individuals away; restricting candidacy to solely those who can make others believe they are 'squeaky clean' does a disservice to all the possible candidates, and to the electorate too.
Totally agree. I think it is reasonable that candidates should be asked to reveal their wikimedia user names (I'm not sure it should be made compulsory though), but demanding that they reveal all their multifarious online identities unrelated to wikimedia is going way too far, and would be an unenforceable and unwarranted invasion of privacy.