--- Sascha Noyes <sascha(a)pantropy.net> wrote:
Yes, I agree. I was just clarifying that this
isn't related to privacy.
Best,
Sascha Noyes
You are right and I am thankful for your
comments. Just to add that my idea is that it
just helps privacy indirectly. Some person may be
more than willing to write in public some
information about himself/herself if he/she does
not expect people to begin redistributing this
information all over the Internet, making it more
and more public.
As an example: I may be happy to announce in
Wikipedia that I don't eat meat nor fish (so I am
a vegetarian). I may do that because I may want
to meet other Wikipedians with the same
preferences etc. There may be dome people that I
wouldn't like to know what I eat and what I don't
eat, for example I would prefer not to let my
friends, family etc know this info. I don't
expect them to be very interested in Wikipedia or
know how to use it. The probability of someone
finding this info is low enough that I consider
it safe to publish such info because I have some
"partial privacy" (the info is public, but I know
few people can or are willing to access it, as
opposed to "total privacy" where many people can
access the info so I prefer not to publish it at
all). However, as Wikipedia is becoming more and
more common, many sites start mirroring its
content, including user pages. In this case, the
probability of someone finding info on me that I
don't want him/her know is becoming higher. This
is just a small simple example about a topic
which is not so important. Hope this helps you to
understand my definition of "relative privacy".
Thus, privacy does not only mean "zero
probability of undesirable information
disclosure". If that probability is low enough by
my standards, I may decide to publish more info
on Wikipedia about me and socialise more.
However, when this probability becomes higher, I
may start feeling uncomfortable and be forced
switch to "total privacy". Especially when other
people are mirroring userpages (and talkpages!).
By having separate downloadable files for
articles and userpages/talkpages, we give the
ability to downloaders get only the material they
are really interested in: The articles. I see no
reason why somebody would want to download all
userpages and talkpages, except if he/she is
interested to research how Wikipedians
communicate with each other etc. In reality I
don't see any need to have userpages and
talkpages downloadable, so such downloadable
files could not exist at all.
We could just have a downloadable file for
Articles and another one for the whole database
(Articles+Userpages+Talkpages). Actually I just
want to make sure that "accidental"
copying/downloading/redistribution of userpages
and talkpages will not happen again.
--Optim
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