Comment by kmaitreys

18 hours ago

I don't think what should be neutral account of factual events should take into account if it would be rude to an individual.

There's no such thing “as neutral account of factual events”, it's a “map and territory” thing, you always have to weight if something is relevant and this is always a subjective exercise.

And then you have to ponder the relevance with whether or not publishing may cause harm.

Let's take an example, unrelated to the topic: why aren't the addresses of stars, or the identification number of billionaires personal jets, listed on Wikipedia? Because it's not relevant, and can be harmful.

And it's the same thing for trans people's name. Most of the time, their birth name is irrelevant and can even be harmful. But sometimes, when it's important, the name will still be there, with the redirection and all, see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_Manning

And, by the way, this isn't a Wikipedia thing, this is how press right works! Newspapers get sued all the time for mentioning irrelevant personal information about people, and lose.

  • Your examples are not equivalent at all. Why do you think the person was bullied? It's additional information that makes the picture clear, which is the purpose of an encyclopedia.

    Any information which is relevant to the subject of article and brings clarity should not be censored, ideally.

    Also if you could understand what I'm saying, you would realise I'm not asking to put birth names of every trans person with a wikipedia article in their article. Because it's not relevant.

    You keep mentioning "harm" but never exactly describe what harm? What more harm can you imagine for a person who committed suicide due to bullying?

    • It is not known why she committed suicide, as she did not leave a note. Bullying is unlikely to be the full picture. What most accounts of her life omit is the considerable trauma she experienced as a young child: she was repeatedly raped by her father, a crime for which he was arrested and convicted.

      The Wikipedia article skims over this, instead focusing on the trans and bullying aspects. This will have been a deliberate editorial choice as well.

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    • > Why do you think the person was bullied?

      Because they weren't behaving as their surrounding wanted them to. The reason was given in the article. You don't need to know the birth certificate name of that kid to talk about that.

      In fact, the very people asking the most loudly for using this name are the crowd that bullied them alive.

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