[WikiEN-l] Biography of Living persons

[toddmallen]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 6:42 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.
>
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I would have a problem with that if all that information weren't
already publicly available. On the other hand, if it had already been
published on the front page of the New York Times, I probably wouldn't
much care-that information would already be out, and I'd already be in
the process of changing those numbers and the like. And sometimes
sexual history -is- genuinely relevant to an article (see [[Monica
Lewinsky]] or [[Gary Hart]] for examples).

Of course, a simple factual real name is a bit different than
publishing someone's telephone number, SSN, or phone number, none of
which I've ever seen in an article (at least not for very long). Nor
do reliable sources tend to publish such things.

An accurate comparison would more be like saying that my real name is
Todd Allen, were there someday to be an article on me. I would expect
that such an article would have my real name in it, and you can see
how little I mind if that's known. The rest is hyperbole, and no one
is arguing to include such things. I can't think of a possible
scenario in which someone's social security number or bank account
number would be relevant to an article, nor can I think of any
circumstances under which a reliable source would publish them. Names
are not the same. "Who" is one of the 5 W's that is taught in
elementary school writing. An article on a subject that does not
answer that question is inherently lacking. The same is not true if it
does not include their credit card number.

People are readily identifiable by the information given about them
anyway. How hard is it to find the Star Wars kid's name, even from our
article, where all the sources we use readily publish it, or a google
search on the article title brings it right up? If something is in
public already (which it by definition is, if reliable sources
available to the public have published it), it is no longer private.
You can say that's good, or bad, or simply inevitable, but it's still
the fact, and to think we can stuff genies back in bottles (even
provided that to do so would be desirable, an odd position for a
project specifically dedicated to making information available to
take) is monumental hubris. We're big, but we're not -that- big.

I don't want to see BLPs that protect this notion of privacy, that we
should not make people identifiable, because in the end, such an
article could say exactly nothing. Giving enough specifics to be
worthwhile makes identifiability inevitable.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.