Talk:Secure electronic signature

I created this page on September 18th, 2008, as part of a number of updates on Digital signature, Electronic signature, and their legal status, especially in Canada. I felt that "Secure electronic signature", a Canadian legal concept defined in PIPEDA, was sufficiently unique to merit its own page, and that having a separate page would be useful to those encountering the term for the first time: Rather than having to read through a lot of material on a related page, a reader could get a summary definition quickly from this page, with references to other pages to provide context.

Soon after, this page was made into a redirect to Electronic signature. Now I'm OK with that, as there are arguments either way, but I do think the concept is new and unique enough that having its definition deep in another page will confuse readers who "just want to know the facts!" (so to speak), that is, just want to know what this thing is.

So I thought it might be useful to discuss this with the broader community, to develop consensus as to whether a redirect to Electronic signature or a stand-alone page with references to Digital signature and Electronic signature is more appropriate.

User:Gerry_Ashton made a very good point when we corresponded about this change: "dealing with the differences in a single article is probably better than making a reader shift between different articles to figure it out". I'm sympathetic to that argument, because I also dislike having to flip around between pages to figure something out. But as someone who works daily in this field and has to explain that difference to policy makers, lawyers who are just learning that law (PIPEDA), technologists, and others, I believe the difference is sufficiently significant to merit a standalone page. (I'll also add the personal observation that these folks have neither time nor interest in reading a general page to get a specific definition.)

Gerry also observed that "the differences among D-S, E-S, and S-E-S are significant, and only the last term is fairly well defined", a perspective I definitely agree with!

I'm a big believer in redundancy in reference documentation, especially when it there is marginal/no cost to the "redundancy". In other words, a separate entry for S-E-S has considerable value and little cost.

Last argument, ad absurdium: One could argue that Digital signature should be a redirect to Electronic signature, since all digital signatures are in fact electronic signatures. But we don't do that because a digital signature is sufficiently different concept and sufficiently well known term on its own that redirecting Digital signature to Electronic signature would actually make Wikipedia less useful for readers who want to know about digital signatures.

Likewise, I believe that having this page as a redirect lowers the overall information value of the two articles, since it confuses a well-defined term with a specific context with an overall concept term whose usage is rather vague.

So, question for the community: Standalone page or redirect?

PeterWhittaker (talk) 17:18, 1 October 2008 (UTC)