[Foundation-l] Interesting legal action

FT2 ft2.wiki at gmail.com
Mon May 23 13:28:11 UTC 2011


A specific email address isn't always available but virtually anyone notable
will have a method of contact that can be found fairly quickly.
Businesspeople have a business, academics have their university website,
politicians and high ranking officials have a political website or
governmental office, authors have a publisher, and a vast number of people
have an easily located personal website, agent, or known organization they
are closely affiliated with. Even alleged criminals have a lawyer or a means
of contact. The kind of stuff needed for contact details is almost always
noted in any "keepable" BLP, or a minute's web searching.

A few may need Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, but I suspect not many.  Only a
very small minority will not be easily identified with a means of email or
other direct contact within a few minutes.

Worth it, I think.

FT2



On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> On 5/23/11 1:40 AM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
> > On 23 May 2011 00:03, FT2<ft2.wiki at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >> Out of interest, when a BLP is created and not speedy deleted, could we
> not
> >> write a standard email to the subject stating that a biographical
> article
> >> has been created on them on the online encyclopedia "Wikipedia",
> inviting
> >> them to review it, explaining what it's about, and pointing them to
> remedies
> >> for fixing minor or major issues or requesting deletion? Hearing from us
> >> might at the very least be seen as "us trying to do something right".
> > I've not heard that idea before; I like it. We should do that. It
> > wouldn't be difficult and would, as you say, show that we are at least
> > trying to do the right thing. We would need to be prepared to deal
> > with the increased traffic to OTRS that it would inevitably result in,
> > but that's not too big a problem.
>
> I don't think it's impossible, but I think finding an email address for
> the average person is going to be harder than you think. I do a good bit
> of email-finding to contact journal-paper authors whose email address
> has changed from the one published in the journal, but especially
> outside of the sciences, this isn't particularly easy. Many professors
> have no websites, and many who do don't have an email address on the
> site. You end up having to dig up the university's "find person"
> database and search, and sometimes that database isn't even publicly
> available. And for celebrities, they actively go out of their way to
> hide their email. CEOs and similar in the business world usually don't
> have emails publicly listed either.
>
> At the very least, it'd be quite a bit of work, and would probably
> require someone willing to use non-email communication channels, like
> LinkedIn messaging or Twitter or something, to achieve reasonable
> coverage. Might be an interesting experiment.
>


More information about the foundation-l mailing list