Players should not have a right to grief the wiki to remove themselves.

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SengornLeopard
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:35 am

Players should not have a right to grief the wiki to remove themselves.

Post by SengornLeopard »

This is going to be a long rant, but please read to the end without skimming if you plan to get a full picture of my position.

The wiki is a living historical record of the server. It is a place where players can document other players, bases, and events. According to the very wiki guidelines, accuracy and professionalism are highly encouraged. To be accurate, one must have the freedom to document all of the facts, who, where, why, when, and how. It is very important to note that information added to the wiki is public information, gained just by playing the server and recording what happens. This information is not private, and there is no expectation of privacy. If a player wanted privacy, they would play on single player.

If a player is allowed to grief the wiki by deleting their bases and pages, this means it is necessary in principle for that player to first give documented consent before their actions and bases are published. This means that all information about bases and players which do not have documented consent should by that very same logic be deleted. Documented consent can be that the player themselves added the information, or gave it in written word.

The idea that a player must consent to have a page written about them or their base violates as well many aspects detailed on https://simplicitypvp.net/w/How_to_Crea ... gs_to_Note.

1.) There is no guideline prohibiting a player from publishing information that is publicly available on SimPVP
2.) To make accurate articles and to avoid red (broken) hyperlinks it is crucial that people can't forbid that they be mentioned.

Do you realize how dramatically the wiki would be reduced, and how many inaccuracies and dead ends would be introduced if someone like Sengorn, Pippinger, or Ostrich decided to nuke their pages and all of their base pages? Having the freedom to write public information about the actions of a player on the server is crucial for a well functioning wiki.

If a player has the 'right' to censor having information about themselves consolidated to a wiki page or a base page, then they must also have the right to remove it from other people's bases and pages. Otherwise the act of censoring has no function other than to make it slightly more tedious to learn about them. At that point you're telling people that because of the rights of one player... they must exclude bases connected to and events around that player just because that other player is associated with it.

If Clipchip decided he will use the right to censor his information on the wiki, It would then mean that Segoria, the largest known base to have existed, would need to censor who greifed it, how and why. That is not fair for anyone. And if I am allowed to write that information on my page, then there is no logical reason I can't just add it to a 'clipchip' specific page and consolidate that information.

Telling players they have a right to grief the wiki and remove themselves and their bases is extremely harmful to the operation of the wiki; considering the damage that would incur if only a few popular players decided to act on this "right". The only expectation of privacy a player should have concerning wiki information is for their personal IRL information.

TL:DR Do not tell players they have a right to not have a page. It makes no rational sense, it violates the guidelines of wiki by greifing information and creates a ton of dead ends and broken links and information voids, and there is no expectation of privacy of your actions on the server
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KoriJenkins
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Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2019 6:09 am

Re: Players should not have a right to grief the wiki to remove themselves.

Post by KoriJenkins »

Deleting pages for bases shouldn't be a thing at all, especially if a base is abandoned. Nor should it be in someone's power to dictate what someone else puts on a page.

No player should have a right to determine whether or not one of their actions is mentioned on the wiki, that's ludicrous. Like you said, clipchip griefed Segoria, a hard fact. His wants are irrelevant against the truth and shouldn't be considered in that context.

Of course, a player saying "I don't want to have a wiki page about me" seems fine, given that those are essentially personal pages. Rarely are they edited by someone other than that player.
Yukar9
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Re: Players should not have a right to grief the wiki to remove themselves.

Post by Yukar9 »

The wiki is a very public place. It's easily accessible, and it shows up in web searches. The decent thing to do when somebody doesn't want content about themselves published is to respect that wish. There's no public interest exception here, this is a minecraft server, and an individual's privacy is more important than what little importance their minecraft server historical information may have.

There may be no expectation of privacy when playing on the server, just as there in many countries isn't an expectation of privacy when out in public. But just because it's technically allowed to take photos of people in public and then publish those photos widely, against the wishes of the subjects, doesn't make doing so acceptable.

You'll just have to live with the wiki being incomplete about a small number of players. There are so many players, bases and historical events missing from the wiki for other reasons, user removal requests account for a tiny tiny fraction of all missing or incomplete wiki content.
SengornLeopard
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Joined: Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:35 am

Re: Players should not have a right to grief the wiki to remove themselves.

Post by SengornLeopard »

"doesn't make doing so acceptable." -> It also doesn't make it unacceptable. To be unacceptable it has to be harmful, and i just don't see how it causes any harm. There is already a wiki guideline about personal information. A minecraft server isn't a nation. People do not join public minecraft servers and reasonably expect that anything they do on it stays private. People make youtube videos here and publish them to Youtube, a GOOGLE platform. Are you going to start saying that youtubers who join SimPVP officially request and document consent now? You also ignored that if consent matters, it must be gained BEFORE someone posts in all cases. People may not want information on the server and have no clue that someone has already did so. If the logic is to be applied soundly, people should request permission to post about a player first, and all pages currently without permission should be deleted until it is sought. Otherwise, the reasoning you're going by is not applied equally in all cases.

I don't see what sort of privacy they lose by having their player history on a minecraft server exposed to google. I do not see what harm it causes. People would have to be getting very specific to get google results for our forums anyway, so specific they may as well be searching on the forums themselves. You can also prevent the forum pages from showing up in google results by adding a noindex meta tag to the the HTML.

Another point that invalidates that is I can mention about a player on any other page and THAT will show up in a google search, so letting people delete personal pages doesn't fix that, at all. There is no violation of privacy, there is no IRL content. Posting "player X on this day established this base and attacked that faction" is NOWHERE near the same thing as posting a real life picture of a person.
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MutualistManiac
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Re: Players should not have a right to grief the wiki to remove themselves.

Post by MutualistManiac »

In my opinion, Sengorn is totally right here. I do not see any reason, outside of being polite, to allow people to delete their pages. I think we should create a separate wiki archive if we wish to document the information on the wiki. Clearly, Yukarion will never listen to those who want the main wiki to keep pages up. If he doesn't feel comfortable doing it, then fine, but the majority of us do. It's annoying when you can no longer find information on the wiki.
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