Tony Sidaway wrote:
On 6/21/07, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Tony Sidaway wrote:
By "WP:V" I assume you mean the verifiability policy. Well in many cases information about relatively private people is quite verifiable, because it appears in medical case studies and in newspapers. A person's name is splashed all over the newspapers because he survives the Virginia Tech massacre. Do we put his name into the encyclopedia? I think it's good that we recognise that there is an ethical question involved in such an act. It isn't as neutral an act of cataloguing as we sometimes like to pretend.
I'm not sure there's any "ethical issue" there at all. As you stated, those peoples' names are very well-known already. I would tend to agree that we shouldn't present a "biography" of such since we can't present a complete one, but not even mentioning the names? That does indeed serve an encyclopedic purpose-making things easier, for example, for a future researcher who might be looking into the massacre, or wishes to follow up. I would think that would outweigh any "ethical" considerations of-what? Republishing already published information?
Our references contain the names, so future researchers can obtain them. Meanwhile we're one of the most popular websites on the internet so putting the names of those individuals here instead of some obscure newspaper archive does raise ethical questions.
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Alright, then you tell me, Tony, since I've seen you, Doc, and a few others continually try to proof-by-assertion this. What -is- the ethical question? The information is already easily available to anyone who wishes to find it, so right-to-privacy doesn't hold. (We're not talking about digging through some obscure town's archives to find these people's names here, a quick Google search will do.) Their names are already widely available and distributed on the web.
Others? Presumably, we weren't saying anything libelous or slanderous about them, and if we were that could have been simply fixed by editing. The main "ethical issue" I see here is such a thing being rammed through, without attempt at community-wide discussion or debate. Put it on the watchlist header. See if the community -wants- this (the whole community, not the OTRS subset). But don't just claim "ethics"-you keep on using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means.
Personally, I would be fully in agreement with moving or merging "event" articles presented as biographies to a title reflecting the event, or merging them into an article about the event, with the name left as a redirect. But we shouldn't wholesale delete the information if it's well-sourced. You asked for an encyclopedic purpose. I gave you one, specifically, precision. (By your logic, all of our information in every article is (or should be) in the references and external links, so we should simply have a list of those, and not put in any prose at all!) We're not a directory to other sites, we're an -encyclopedia-. And part of a reference work's task is to be precise. Put the exact number. Name the name. Use the precision scientific terminology. Put down the exact formula.
I agree with you on some things, Tony, but this has gone much, much too far. Please, would you be willing to slow down, get this discussed (by the WIDER community, those who may not routinely know policy gets discussed until they run headfirst into it), and put it on the watchlist notice? This is certainly a far more major change than ATT (after all, that just consolidated -existing- policy into one page without changing it), and that merited a watchlist notice. Let's do that again, and let's really see what people think. Not just the ArbCom, not just OTRS, but everyone as a whole. Maybe it'll turn out you're right! If people turn out overwhelmingly in support of your position, you'll likely never run into significant resistance again. On the other hand, if it turns out there really isn't any consensus, maybe time to rethink.