[WikiEN-l] Policy on putting email addresses on wiki pages

[Stephen Bain]

On 1/31/06, Tom Steinberg <tom at tomsteinberg.co.uk> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> We've been mulling dumping all the Northern Ireland Assembly member's
> email addresses onto the relevent page on wikipedia, and then writing
> a scraper script to keep our own WriteToThem systems up to date.
>
> This raises a policy question:
>
> Is it permissable to put email addresses on wikipedia, if they're
> already public?

If opening up a regular encyclopaedia, and browsing the article on a
person, would you expect to find their email address? I don't think
so.

Moreover, if you want to keep your own software up to date, please use
your own facilities for this, rather than exploiting Wikipedia. The
developers do not take kindly to scripts scraping content off the
Wikimedia sites.

--
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com