Comment by littlestymaar
15 hours ago
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.
Thanks for more context. Yeah the article seems very neutered (I think it's fair to say lying by omission, especially to me who just learn about the incident through this thread/this article). I think that's the whole argument. Wikipedia is not news and you cannot get first hand full context picture from it.
Instead, like everything else, it's another opinionated aggregator of information.
> 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.
I got some additional context from another reply. Your replies are vague and don't clear things for me. Just like the article.
In your earlier reply you said relevancy of something was subjective. No. Inference of facts from given information by each person may be subjective. But the information itself, must never be influenced by the subjectivity stemming from the information provider.
I get that revealing some information which maybe considered sensitive will be used by awful people. But that doesn't apply here. You cannot withhold information on the pretense that it will be used maliciously. Otherwise it's no different that dystopian stories of catching criminals before they commit crime.