[WikiEN-l] Personal information - where do we draw the line
Delirium
delirium at hackish.org
Sun Nov 13 20:43:38 UTC 2005
Jimmy Wales wrote:
>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.
>
>
I agree with that, and think this is similar (though not identical) to
the more general issue of publishing supposedly secret information that
is not really secret (or has been previously leaked by someone other
than us). On most such cases we seem to have come to a pro-publication
consensus, with the caveat that we should only publish it if it's
actually useful to have in the article, not solely to give a "fuck you"
to the people trying to keep it secret.
This has come up in a number of cases:
-- The semi-secret higher-level books of Scientology
-- Some semi-secret (or at least considered private) aspects of Mormon
temple practices
-- Details of how some U.S. military training programs work, based on
published exposes in magazines
-- Information on classified military programs in general
-- Secrets of fraternal societies like the Freemasons
In most of those cases, there have been people who have tried to remove
information, others who have tried to add more information mostly for
the sake of doing so, and a bunch in between who have generally hammered
out a compromise.
Personal information is slightly different, in that it can harm a
particular person, but in a certain sense that's not all that
different---at least one person has suggested that publishing non-public
information on military training programs could lead to soldiers'
deaths, and therefore that Wikipedia irresponsible in publishing it.
-Mark
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