Talk:Wikipedia

Wikipedia's privacy violations

I have to restore contents related to name and shame pages which was originally removed by User:Keith for several reasons:

• For In at least one case where a user accused of being an LTA is an apparent juvenile, no special measures to consider their privacy rights (i.e. hiding LTA pages to only audiences with Wikipedia accounts) are apparently observed, it was supported or otherwise corroborated by this and this, the very latter being a page in which it exposed the private information of a juvenile editor for allegingly engaging in vandalism in Disney topic areas on Wikipedia.

• For Such practices may risk violating GDPR as there's also a case where scientific researchers based in Czech Republic and Slovakia were doxxed that way due to accusations that they had engaged in self-promoting edits on Wikipedia. At a glance, little to no fact-checking and quality checking processes were observed in the LTA page creation process, which may mean that some or all accusations in some if not all of LTA pages may be inaccurate and could therefore constitute defamation/libel, two citations namely this and this were provided, the former which indeed links to a page containing the personal information of the scientific researchers while the latter would obviously appear as poorly-written contents for any reasonable observers.

15.254.3.204 13:52, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

I've re-removed the section for pretty much the same reason as before - excessive detail with no external references demonstrating the notability or relevance of the issue. Above all else there's no notability - the references are all just to specific wikipedia pages, without a single secondary source. This wiki is not intended to be a place for original research and reporting, it is instead meant to compile externally verified and discussed consumer rights issues. We have significantly more relaxed sourcing guidelines than wikipedia, but we still do not allow for original research. Honestly at this point I'm really not sure there's a need for the section in the first place, as it seems like an internal moderation policy question for wikipedia, and a cursory google doesn't seem to indicate that there's even much in the way of controversy surrounding it. Keith (talk) 17:47, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

User:Keith At one of the sources linked here there's the following comment:

Quite a few entries here have very specific personal information, that if likely put anywhere else on WP would lead to it being oversighted very quickly.

I won't be linking the exact reports for obvious privacy reasons, but here are some privacy concerns I have noticed:

One LTA report lists the vandal's location as being in a small town in the US with a population of roughly around 300 people. While IP addresses are hard to exactly track down without contacting the ISP, and that vandals in more populated places such as The Bronx and Mobile, Alabama (using actual LTA examples here) are also hard to track down, should we really have a very small town listed as a vandal's location? With the size of the town, and considering how easy this page is to find, it could potentially be very easy for a person with bad intentions to track that editor down.

At least three LTA reports either have the usernames of what could be a full legal name or they use their full name as part of their modus operandi. While it may be useful in identifying socks, I'm pretty sure full names are oversightable. Some of these editors may be minors, which makes it even more dangerous. I'm surprised that some of the full names haven't been oversighted already.

I would immediately email the oversight team if this was on any other page, however, with a page like LTA, I want to see consensus first, so I don't make any mistakes.

Maybe the FULU Foundation should consider acquiring Accountability Wiki to serve as a sister project as an off-ramp in the event that Consumer Rights Wiki declines to include the information even though it was made clear multiple times that topics about Wikipedia are edge cases unlike incidents at many other tech platforms like TikTok?15.254.3.204 20:21, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

I think acquiring Accountability Wiki would be substantial scope creep for FULU - FULU is an organisation pretty squarely focused on reforming Sec. 1201 of the DMCA. This wiki has substantial overlap with that goal, and FULU supports it because it expects the wiki to be a useful resource in collating and presenting evidence that can be used while lobbying, and our scope/policies are designed to try and avoid veering off into the wider societal/other issues that the accountability wiki seems interested in dealing with. In general, the scope of the accountability wiki seems to be a lot broader and vaguer in a way that's likely to make it challenging to seem like a reliable source to outsiders reading it, which is a core component of our mission.

From the way that person you quoted is talking about the issue, it really does feel like an internal moderation policy decision, rather than a consumer rights issue. I suppose an equivalent example might be: if a large Youtuber such as Mr Beast were to name and shame someone who was harrassing him, would that make sense to include here, if he posted it on an official business account? Or if Louis named and shamed a disruptive customer that came into his shop? It could certainly be a controversy that gets talked about, but I've got a gut feeling that it isn't really the type of thing that belongs on this wiki.

Anonymous blog comments also don't really contribute to notability - if there was a full blog article written about it in the site then that could potentially contribute to notability (though I'm still not sure about its relevancy). Keith (talk) 21:54, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Update: I found a comment at the pro-Israeli "Wikipedia Flood" blog talking about the name and shame pages meaning that there's a modicum of notability at least.70.224.233.194 20:39, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Template:Ping Template:Ping Extended contents now backed up at HandWiki and [Oldenburg University's American Department wiki site https://wiki.angl-am.uni-oldenburg.de/wiki/index.php?title=Wikipedia]. Y'all can have a nice day. I'm Ron by the way.185.120.146.117 22:28, 2 December 2025 (UTC)