[Foundation-l] Re: Authoring on wikijunior : providing private information.

Fri Sep 30 12:08:55 UTC 2005

Anthere wrote:

>
>
> And yes, your request was not a bug, it is something to be debated. 
> Developers were correct in their answer ihmo. We should be very 
> careful about that Robert.

I have tried to start the discussion about this issue in the past, but 
most places I made the request about the topic it became a dead issue 
with most people suggesting that it was a non-issue.  In this particular 
instance with the Wikijunior Solar System (and moving on subsequently to 
other Wikijunior books like the Big Cats volume) I decided to "BE BOLD" 
and try to collect the information for that volume alone.  On the 
Wikijunior Solar System side, there have been many contributions to this 
information, and I've had the notice up there requesting comments for at 
least two months now with absolutely no discussion what so ever.  In 
this regard I am grateful that you are even asking about and questioning 
the request for this information.  Seriously.  At least there is a 
difference of opinion and now a serious discussion can take place rather 
than a one-sided discussion where nobody seems to care.

All I'm trying to do is collect what public information is already 
available for each of the authors listed.  That is a problem sometimes 
with computer databases in that when the information is scattered around 
and not collected you don't think anything of it to mention personal 
details of your life, but when you actually see it gathered together in 
an easily searchable form you start to question the rationale of having 
that information widely available.  Information about you is currently 
being kept by governments and private corporations all of the time, and 
legitimate social discussions do need to take place about how much 
privacy should we expect when we leave a public paper trail that can be 
researched and have data mining performed on that information.

If this is going to turn into a general discussion about how much people 
can do by trying to do data mining on Wikimedia projects, I welcome that 
sort of discussion.  In this case, I'm doing data mining of authors on a 
particuar Wikiproject, trying to get information about the authors 
including their full real name, nationality, and other related 
information.  Some of this I've been able to find through means other 
than a voluntary contribution of this information, including searching 
talk pages and user pages.  Should I stop that sort of searching, even 
if I can find that sort of data in a "public" forum (like talk pages 
generally are)?  Should the privacy policy be expanded to specifically 
prohibit this sort of data mining?  I don't know the answers to these 
questions, but at least I'm doing this sort of research out in the open 
and in public.  There is nothing stopping anybody else from doing this 
sort of research and keeping it for themselves either, or keeping it in 
a private database for some purpose that you may not appreciate or like.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning