[WikiEN-l] Changing the AfD process (Was: Re: [[Daniel Brandt]] is gone again)

[David Goodman]

On 6/21/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/22/07, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> > On 6/21/07, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 6/21/07, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > 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.
> > >
> > >
> > > Actually, it does.  We are not a newspaper archive and our standards
> > > are not theirs.  If we do not need to use the names of living private
> > > individuals, we should not do so, because *every* publication of
> > > information about a private individual diminishes his privacy, and
> > > while we are not in a position to control the contents of many
> > > newspaper archives, we certainly are in complete control of one of the
> > > most popular information sources on the planet.  We should not
> > > needlessly compromise privacy.
> > >
> > I can only agree with that for some value of "needlessly".  While
> > there are some cases where there's absolutely no benefit to adding a
> > name to an article, and other cases where there's absolutely no point
> > in having an article without having a name, it's those in-between
> > cases that are the ones where we have to make a judgment.
> >
>
> Absolutely.  The key is that we should always ask ourselves if
> including the names of private individuals is necessary for
> completeness.  Usually it isn't.
>
I wouldn't say "usually"  Human beings are primarily interested in
other human beings, and usually remember events by the names of the
participants (rather than the place or the date), and to understand
the event in terms of its effects on individual people, not a
discussion with all the names cunningly avoided.

-- 
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.