On 11 April 2011 16:04, Alison M. Wheeler <wikimedia(a)alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
Every individual is entitled to keep their private life exactly that, and where
such online persona(s) are exist and are attributable to that private life I do
not believe voters or other WM-related people have any right to know about them
when they would not have any impact upon their ability to perform the tasks they
are seeing. To give a few examples what about where someone suffers from
depression so has an online identity which they use to seek mutual support from
others? Where they are GBLT but would lose their employment or family if it were
to become public so use an additional persona online? Where they have a blogging
identity which 'whistleblows' on a business they are associated with (eg police,
ambulance, etc) where the same could happen?
There are many other use cases for online anonymity too which are completely
valid and would not impact on their ability to work for WMUK or the WM projects
generally. We should not be forcing such capable individuals away; restricting
candidacy to solely those who can make others believe they are 'squeaky clean'
does a disservice to all the possible candidates, and to the electorate too.
Totally agree. I think it is reasonable that candidates should be
asked to reveal their wikimedia user names (I'm not sure it should be
made compulsory though), but demanding that they reveal all their
multifarious online identities unrelated to wikimedia is going way too
far, and would be an unenforceable and unwarranted invasion of
privacy.
Andrew
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BabelStone