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I have to believe that if someone was posting this to Wikipedia, the information was already publicly available. If you want something to be a secret, don't tell people about it. (See also, the Streissand Effect.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't understand that user's frustration? You edit the article, source the information, and all you get is baffling bureaucracy. Then it turns out that the people who'd been quibbling with you all that time knew you were right and were maintaining a front to keep the information hidden. It's the sort of thing dystopian novels are made of...
Yeah, but if the user wasn't anonymous, he could have been contacted by the wikipedia admins and suggested that perhaps the information wasn't worthy of the public domain yet. Any reasonable person would understand the risk to the man's life and held back from posting it.
I understand that wikipedia wants to lower the barrier to entry by allowing anonymous edits, and I have sometimes made anonymous edits out of convenience, but personally if it was me and I had had two edits reversed I would have just logged on, left an eponymous message on the talk page saying "I am confused, I keep wanting to add this information, which does not violate the guidelines, and I keep getting locked out. Help?".
Then at least the people trying to protect the victim would have had a chance to put their case forward.
There is also evidence that kidnappers DO look online for information, I seem to remember a story about a journalist pointing to his Wikipedia entry to convince his kidnappers that he was Canadian, not American? British? (can't remember what the offending nationality was) and that proved to be a factor in his release.
- Other reporters and nonprofit workers considering going to Afghanistan. How many of your colleagues have been kidnapped doing something you're considering doing is pretty useful information. Even if you still decide to do it, you might demand extra compensation for the risk. The editors of the New York Times may have saved themselves substantial hazard pay by keeping this secret. - The kidnappers, obviously, who apparently represent the former government of Afghanistan. This might seem unremarkable (who would side with the kidnappers, after all?) except that it is very unusual for Wikipedia to take sides in a contentious international issue like this, even in cases where there are clear issues of right and wrong (Scientology, Guantánamo, the US's support for terrorist guerrillas in Nicaragua in the 1970s, etc.) There's a strong tradition of letting the reader decide. - Old friends of David Rohde wondering why they hadn't heard from him in months. - Anyone who, in the future, seeks information that fairly presents all sides of an issue without the fear that some sides have been entirely suppressed. (This is the first such case, to my knowledge.) I imagine this case will be brought up every time some kid from a radical madrasa tries to convince his buddies that actually the US did take action to save Muslims from persecution in Bosnia, using Wikipedia and the sources it cites to make his case.
I agree that there is a plausible case to make that secrecy was the lesser of the evils, but I don't think it's an open-and-shut case. If nothing else, it's possible that this secrecy has already resulted in the deaths of other journalists.
> “But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”
I'm really glad to hear the guys escaped, even though it was obvious from the premise. However, the final line sounds terribly Orwellian to me: > “But the idea of a pure openness, a pure democracy, is a naïve one.”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't understand that user's frustration? You edit the article, source the information, and all you get is baffling bureaucracy. Then it turns out that the people who'd been quibbling with you all that time knew you were right and were maintaining a front to keep the information hidden. It's the sort of thing dystopian novels are made of...
Yeah, but if the user wasn't anonymous, he could have been contacted by the wikipedia admins and suggested that perhaps the information wasn't worthy of the public domain yet. Any reasonable person would understand the risk to the man's life and held back from posting it.
Recently it seems like the NYTimes jumps on every opportunity to write articles about the downsides of its new-media competitors. First LinkedIn crowdsourcing, now problems with Wikipedia decentralization. Just getting a bit old.
When the news broke Saturday, the user from Florida reposted the information, with a note to administrators that said: “Is that enough proof for you [expletives]? I was right. You were WRONG.” Wow, so do we have a name for this phenomenon yet? I think I'll write up an RFC for "Monroe's Law"[1] tomorrow. [1]: http://xkcd.com/386/
You don't understand that user's frustration? You edit the article, source the information, and all you get is baffling bureaucracy. Then it turns out that the people who'd been quibbling with you all that time knew you were right and were maintaining a front to keep the information hidden. It's the sort of thing dystopian novels are made of...