On 11/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Nonetheless, my correspondent asks me an interesting question: where do we draw the line?
As a practical matter, I think what we follow is a non-policy in this area, that is to say, we follow the same exact policies we follow for all sorts of information: is it verifiable, is it NPOV?
I don't think we should treat personal information any differently to any other information. If there is evidence, cite it. If that evidence is not good enough, then the name *cannot* go in the article. Our verifiability policy already provides for this. Example: we can say that Bill Bryson was born and grew up in Des Moines, because he says so in his books. We could also say that his wife is British, because he says so in his books. However, we could not publish his current home address, or the names of his children, becuase these have never been quoted elsewhere.
Basically, the presence of someone's name/personal information in Wikipedia should never increase their danger. The information should only go in if it is already incontrovertibly in the public domain. WP:V and WP:NOR provide for this. The person's information would already be in the public domain, so there's no worry about keeping it there.
My own opinion is that in most cases we should publish real names if any mainstream media outlet has done so first. We should not (usually) regard blogs and hate sites as sufficiently reliable confirmation for real names. We never post anyone's home address (since this is just totally unencyclopedic and irrelevant to our mission anyway), though of course there could be some bizarre exceptions I suppose.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington D.C. 20500 USA
Sam