User talk:2A02:A212:A583:5980:F635:52:AA7D:81A7

April 2024
Please refrain from making unconstructive edits to Wikipedia, as you did at Murder of Linda Andersen. Your edits appear to constitute vandalism and have been reverted. If you would like to experiment, please use the sandbox. Repeated vandalism may result in the loss of editing privileges. Thank you. My real namm (💬talk · ✏️contribs) at 20:45, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Since you did ask for an explanation (albeit rather rudely, but that's beside the point now), as well as harassing (well, attempting to harass me) at Commons, as the admin (not "mod", please) who redacted the edits you made and blocked your /64 range from editing the article and its talk page (but I am not the one who blocked your IP directly for a month), I will give it to you as, to be fair, I don't think the other editor quite understood why they were doing it.

You are correct in pointing out that the privacy provisions of Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) do not apply to Wikipedia as we are under U.S. jurisdiction (nor do they perhaps apply to you, if you are indeed in the Netherlands and not just using a proxy). However, they do have an indirect effect, as we have had for many years (since this happened; I was here then, amazingly) very strict policies about how we handle material about living people, particularly when it is negative information. Those policies are actually stricter than necessary under defamation laws in the U.S. (as indeed is the case at many media outlets), not just because neither the Foundation nor individual users want to get sued but also because it's the right thing to do. Those laws do create in part the situations that affect whether we publish the family's real name or not.

One of them is when people are notable for a single event, i.e., two teenage girls, not notable otherwise, who plotted to kill their mother and almost got away with making it look like an accident. I find the following passages from a subsection that specifically addresses the issue of using names most relevant to this article: "Caution should be applied when identifying individuals who are discussed primarily in terms of a single event. When the name of a private individual has not been widely disseminated or has been intentionally concealed, such as in certain court cases or occupations, it is often preferable to omit it, especially when doing so does not result in a significant loss of context ... The presumption in favor of privacy is strong in the case of family members of articles' subjects'' and other loosely involved, otherwise low-profile persons." Note emphasis. Since Mitchell assigned all the family members pseudonyms in his account, using them allows us to avoid the dilemma of having to use clumsy workarounds like "the mother", "the older daughter" and "the younger daughter" or using their names.

Because of the YCJA, the names were never published in Canadian media (I don't know if any of the reporters who covered the case knew them; although Global News certainly does, as it uses pseudonyms when it interviewed them and noted that it cannot identify them under the YCJA. And the case never really gained any attention outside Canada (I didn't know about it until I read this article, and I live in a state that borders on Canada, although to be fair there are probably a few notable crimes from around here that no one in Canada's ever heard of, either).

We have applied these policies to keep names out of articles in other contexts. When I researched and wrote Murder of Janet March years ago, a key prosecution witness was a paralegal at her husband's law firm whom he tried to initiate an affair with, getting himself fired in the process. Her name is in some of the court documents, available online and in some cases used as sources, but after noting that Nashville-area media avoided using her name when covering the trial I decided we didn't need to either, and no one's tried to restore it. Last year, after a lot of debate about this (mostly because one editor really, really wanted to do it) we decided we did not need to use the name of George Santos's wife in the article, even though it has a subsection discussing his marriage to her and the questions about it, since although The Daily Beast does The New York Times does not, as she has refused all interviews and gone out of her way to avoid the media.

You said in one of your edits that "their names are all over the Internet" which brings me to the next question.

Could we use their names if we find enough reliable sources outside Canada doing it? Possibly. But remember they can't be blogs or forum posts. And the policy on using names I linked above also goes so far as to say "When deciding whether to include a name, its publication in secondary sources other than news media, such as scholarly journals or the work of recognized experts, should be afforded greater weight than the brief appearance of names in news stories." So I think there would have to be a lot of reliably-sourced news coverage from different countries outside Canada to even begin to justify using their real names in the article.

If you would like to again repost the sources you offered here, you may as you can still edit this page while you're blocked as long as you don't use it abusively. I'd be willing to take a look at them (if you hit "reply" after this and put your message in the box, I'll be notified that you did). Remember not to put the names in your edit, though. Daniel Case (talk) 02:05, 14 April 2024 (UTC)