That is my position, too. The Elizabeth Smart case is a good example of the news media choosing their words with care, but reporting on her sexual abuse by her alleged kidnapper. FloNight aka Sydney
Delirium wrote:
SP wrote:
Can anyone remember any place in Wikipedia English where naming rape victims in articles is discussed? I'm trying to find community consensus, one way or the other, on this point.
This sort of stuff is discussed constantly in a variety of contexts, and I think that in most of them the consensus ends up as "publish the information if it has already been published by a mainstream news source".
In addition to crime victims, other cases where it comes up are:
- The names of underaged alleged criminals
- Secret or semi-secret information about an organization's internal
workings (e.g. Scientology).
- Leaked classified information
In all these cases, the consensus, as far as I can tell, is that refraining from publishing something that has already been widely published does not really accomplish much besides make our articles less informative. We shouldn't "out" people or "break" stories ourselves, or republish information that has only been previously published in fringe/sketchy sources, but summarizing what has already been reported in the mainstream media is fair game.
-Mark