Wikipedia:Obscure public information
 | This is a failed proposal. Consensus for its implementation was not established within a reasonable period of time. If you want to revive discussion, please use the talk page or initiate a thread at the village pump. |
Following discussion on Talk:Wikimedia Foundation and emails with Cary and Jimmy, it seems we are missing a policy to deal with information that, while publicly available, is not readily available and putting it on Wikipedia could cause harm that having it in the original source does not. Therefore, I (Tango) propose the following policy:
- Wikipedia is not and should not be the place to blaze the trail in documenting obscure information, especially about living individuals.
- In order to be included in Wikipedia, information that could cause harm (directly or indirectly) to living people must not only be available in a reliable, public source, but in a reliable, readily available public source. If the source is available only with significant effort or only to a small subset of the public, it should not be included. For example, information that is available only by looking it up in official records (with all the bureaucracy that usually involves), or is available only to people visiting a particular public place which is not generally frequented by the public, should only be included in Wikipedia if it cannot cause any harm by being so.