[WikiEN-l] Radical redefinition of OR

[Ray Saintonge]

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>  
>
>>Court judgements (and, for that matter, court filings by the disputants, 
>>and even trial transcripts) are a matter of public record.  This is an 
>>important component to maintaining the transparency of the judicial 
>>system.  Privacy should not be a factor with this kind of material.
>>    
>>
>I think the point about privacy is that (as far as I know) there is a 
>general consensus that someone sysematically going through court records 
>to write articles about people who were convicted of drunk driving, or 
>who were involved in a lawsuit, is a bad idea.  
>
The lawsuit here is not a matter of having been so unfortunate as to be 
caught driving drunk pure and simple.  The issues relate to how Langan  
presents himself to the world in relation to those issues and 
organizations which make him encyclopedic and/or notable.  The 
references to the judgements may very well havew come from his opponents 
in the case, but that is not the same as systematically sifting through 
court records to find dirt on the guy

>We need to have some 
>kind of independent verification (i.e. WP:NOR) that the incident or 
>lawsuit is notable and worthy of inclusion in an article, and that in 
>the case of people of very minor notability, there is no very good 
>reason to include it.
>
I've taken time to think about this before answering, and I keep 
arriving at the conclusion that it is not correct to suppress this 
information.  I had never heard of Langan before this came up.  Going 
through the long talk page attached to his article I get the impression 
that this guy is a streetfighter who is ready to do whatever it takes to 
win his point.

Thus far the discussion of this matter seems to have dragged in every 
major policy imaginable.  I've already referred to privacy  Court 
decisions are public documents.  Even if they are not published they are 
at least available in court registries for those who may be interested 
or who want to make copies.

Whwther the decision is important enough to mention is a different 
issue.  I would not want to mix that in with notability policy.  
Notability policy has a very high degree of subjectivity, and 
traditionally relates to whether we should have an article at all.  
Expanding such a policy to the point where it is an argument for 
including varous bits of data within an article gives that already 
overworked policy too much work.

It has also been mentioned that we should consider the policies on 
Biographies of Living Persons.  This policy is rightly there so that we 
can better avoid untruths about living person.  Incidentally to that we 
also avoid lawsuits for libel.  Langan needs to know that citing a 
judge's decison is not libellous unless the citation grossly distorts 
the decision.  The point here is that the fact of a legal decision, and 
what it says is verifiable.

NPOV has not apparently been violated.  If there are errors of 
interpretation they can be fixed in the spirit of NPOV.  A judge's 
decision is by it's very nature NPOV; it's a judges's job to distill the 
arguments of the parties to come up with a fair judgement.  We can 
examine a judge's decision in the hopes of derving an even more neutral 
result, but in the absence of provable bias the onus is on those raising 
questions to point out errors.  Langan appears to object  to the fact 
that the default judgement was granted ex parte.  The natural 
presumption in a default judgement is that the defendant does not really 
care to defend himself, and that he has no case.  He generally has ample 
opportunity to respond, and in this regard it differs significantly from 
other ex parte actions.

Finally, is the information about the court case original research?  I 
think that this concept has migrated significantly from its original 
intent of keeping crackpot theories manageable.  When we run around in 
circles trying to determiine whether a source is primary or secondary I 
really don't think we accomplish anything.  Saying that we cannot accept 
information contained in a priimary source until it has been properly 
distorted by a secondary source does not strike me as a fair path to an 
accurate article.  A secondary source must still properly reflect its 
own sources, and a dilligent researcher will make certain of that.

I think that some mention of the legal actions is properly included in 
the article, though I hesitate to say how much.

Ec