[WikiEN-l] Biography of Living persons

[Wily D]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Ian Woollard <ian.woollard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/1/2 toddmallen <toddmallen at gmail.com>:
>> Actually, I do see it as a false dichotomy. We're presenting it as
>> "rights" against publication of verifiable, reliable,
>> already-published material. These rights do not exist. I do not have a
>> right to tell you that you may not talk about me or publish
>> information about me, provided what you say is true.
>
> If I understand you correctly, you would be (theoretically) fine with
> me creating a wikipedia page of you and filling it with true
> information about you, including your social security number, bank
> account number, telephone number, mothers maiden name, address, entire
> sexual history, provided all of this can be said to be correct by a
> notable source and referenced correctly?
>
> I'm assuming not, at least I hope not.
>
> But in practice then, legally and morally and by wiki policy and
> guidelines, these rights to demand that information be removed do
> exist for certain classes of information.
>
> So I think what we're really discussing here *which* kinds of personal
> information may be published in the wikipedia and under what
> circumstances.
>
> --
> -Ian Woollard
>
> We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
> imperfect world would be much better.

The problem with this statement is that the fact that few of these
things are known publicly and the inappropriateness of publishing them
in Wikipedia are correlated.  My telephone number is already on the
internet where any idiot with ten seconds to spare can find it
(http://www.411.ca) which also tells you my street address.  The rest
of these things simply aren't available, which is reflective of the
fact that publishing them is seen as inappropriate -

Cheers
Brian