Inkipedia:Proposals/Failed/Personal Information Overhaul

This is a policy proposal.

The policy has not been approved yet.

This is a somewhat minor proposal to change the existing personal information policy. The primary changes are:

• Removing email address, as it is a MediaWiki supported feature.
• Making the reveal of personal information a stricter infraction.
• Defining a specific punishment for the revealing of other users' information (doxxing).

The full draft can be found here.

Start date: 28 August 2023

End date: 18 September 2023

Support

1. It's all common sense, good stuff! GloverMist (talk) 10:21, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
2. EminenceTalk 17:25, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
3. Odd (Talk) 20:38, 28 August 2023 (UTC)
4. -Xando (talk) 12:24, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Reasoning below. Heddy (talk) 21:09, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Neutral

1. Eli (talk) 13:53, 30 August 2023 (UTC) – largely agree with Heddy

Discussion

Email has always been a "MediaWiki supported feature", but that's not a valid reason to allow people to place their personal email directly on the page. That is dangerous, and exposes the email to web crawler bots that collect emails. Instead, people should continue to input the email into the Preferences page, and use the [[Special:EmailUser/YourUsername]] code on their user page. This hides your actual email address, while still allowing others to send you an email. Let's not remove mention of email from the policy, or better yet, we could offer specific guidance on how to safely add your email to the system and allow people to email you without ever giving them your email address. Heddy (talk) 22:10, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

I see it as a risk. People should expect a public-facing email to be violently scraped and spammed regardless of where it is placed by exterior third parties. Just because the mediawiki method hides this content doesn't mean that users *have* to (although they very well should). That is their responsibility, not inherently ours. Trig - 22:52, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

But they do currently *have* to use the MW email feature with the current policy. I think it's worth taking some responsibility in informing users to not post email publicly, as the current policy does. The whole point of the policy is to protect users, and I don't believe it's wise to strip it of one protection, when we should instead be enhancing that part with more info. It's possible to add an abuse filter to prevent emails in userspace, and possible to display a helpful instructional message to users attempting to add an email, that way we don't have to have email removal as our responsibility, as the system would totally prevent emails in the first place. Those are the kind of enhancements I would expect in an overhaul to this policy, not a removal where we just give up at protecting a certain aspect of user privacy. Heddy (talk) 23:50, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

+1 to everything Heddy has said above. –Eli (talk) 13:54, 30 August 2023 (UTC)