On 5/5/05, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:
This legal talk is entirely irrelevant to the issue at
hand ...
There is an encyclopedic interest issue at stake. Will relevant
information be
removed from an article because an exposed fraud's ego
is bruised?
David, regarding the issue of encyclopedic
interest: public figures
are treated very differently by journalists, particularly in the U.S.
where libel law is quite different when it comes to public figures,
but also in other countries where there's no distinction in law.
Public figures are seen to some extent as fair game, whereas the right
of private individuals to retain their privacy and dignity is
respected by good journalists, so even if some demonstrably true
titbit comes their way, they'll hesitate to use it if it would damage
a private person, provided there's no public-interest issue at stake.
Wikipedia has become an incredibly powerful medium but we don't have
any kind of an ethical code for cases like this. We have no lawyers,
no heirarchy of editors, no fact-checking procedures: none of the
infrastructure of large, powerful news organizations, and yet we have
arguably as much power as some of them. It's a sobering thought. All
I'm arguing is that we should take that power seriously, and never
abuse it; and if a private person complains that we have, where
there's no public-interest issue involved, we should err on the side
of caution and kindness, because we lose nothing by doing that, but
the person being criticized might lose a lot if we don't (regardless
of the details of this particular case: I'm talking generally).
Sarah