That is my position, too. The Elizabeth Smart case is a good example of
the news media choosing their words with care, but reporting on her
sexual abuse by her alleged kidnapper.
FloNight aka Sydney
Delirium wrote:
SP wrote:
Can anyone remember any place in Wikipedia
English where naming rape
victims in articles is discussed? I'm trying to find community
consensus, one way or the other, on this point.
This sort of stuff is discussed constantly in a variety of contexts,
and I think that in most of them the consensus ends up as "publish the
information if it has already been published by a mainstream news
source".
In addition to crime victims, other cases where it comes up are:
* The names of underaged alleged criminals
* Secret or semi-secret information about an organization's internal
workings (e.g. Scientology).
* Leaked classified information
In all these cases, the consensus, as far as I can tell, is that
refraining from publishing something that has already been widely
published does not really accomplish much besides make our articles
less informative. We shouldn't "out" people or "break" stories
ourselves, or republish information that has only been previously
published in fringe/sketchy sources, but summarizing what has already
been reported in the mainstream media is fair game.
-Mark