[WikiEN-l] Newyorkbrad's speech at Wikiconference New York

[Charles Matthews]

Actually a point I felt was missing from NYB's talk, which took 
"privacy" as general theme, was this: as we know from WP:NOT, Wikipedia 
is not concerned with "indiscriminate" information. This ought to 
provide some clear blue water between us and popular journalism, which 
actually uses "indiscimination" quite often as a technique (e.g. twenty 
things you didn't know about some reality TV star, or lists of peoplr 
whose birthday is today). The argument put forth under the "where are 
they now?" discussion should be considered under this heading, I 
believe. Someone who won an Olympic medal 30 years ago is now pumping 
gas? If we exclude that from the athlete's WP article, is it (a) 
censorship, (b) respect for privacy, or (c) application of WP:NOT under 
the general heading  of including the salient facts on someone, not 
everything that has ever been printed?

Anyway, while the basic points that "privacy in the old sense of 
protection from intrusive publication may not exist in the Internet age" 
and "attack pages with high search engine prominence do work" may be 
valid, I had this comment to make about the concluding section of the 
talk, namely that we have our mission and it is not identical to tabloid 
journalism.

Charles