Forum:Contact information

Forums: Index > Watercooler > Contact information

I feel that contact information such as IM names isn't appropriate in articles about people, and I'm inclined to feeling the same for e-mail addresses. The pattern I've been taking part in is moving such contact information to user pages, but what about articles with contact information when the subject of the article is not a user here? -- Sine 05:36, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. IM names and e-mail addresses should be the user's choice to put in User space. And if they don't have an account here, then they just default to not having it on their article. --Rat 05:45, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

This sounds like a good policy to me. ----DuncanDaHusky^(talk) 11:48, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Should it be written up as policy, and/or within the article guidelines somewhere? -- Sine 17:57, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Why shouldn't it be on the pages about them if they put it there? Then it's obviously something that they want others to know, and it seems like it's just the sort of information people would be looking for if they wanted to look someone up. The average reader is not likely to know that such information is on the user page. After all, that's for information about the user's activities here, not elsewhere. --GreenReaper^(talk) 19:53, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

I can think of a few reasons why contact info might not be the best thing for an article:

1. Contact info can change frequently.
2. I don't think it "looks" very encyoclopedic, at least from what I see on Wikipedia and other sites. I am aware that this is a purely subjective observation on my part.

Perhaps as a comprimise we could modify the contributor tempalte so that it includes a blurb about contact info being available on the user page? Thoughts? --Douglas Muth 20:29, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

If people see articles with people's contact information in them (and they probably won't check an article's history to see who put it there), they might assume it's okay to add that information to articles about other people they know. Come to think of it, that argument could apply to any other type of information about a person, which if anything suggests that we should be careful about differentiating what information is allowed based on whether that person or someone else added it. That's not to say that we should never differentiate on that bases, just that we should be careful how much we do. --mwalimu 20:57, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Direct contact information is not something I would expect to see on an encyclopedia-type article about someone. I'm with Dmuth in that I feel it looks weird. More specifically, I think contact information being in an article suggests that articles should have contact information, and doesn't make it obvious that contact information shouldn't be added or changed by someone other than the person in question. -- Sine 21:00, 26 October 2006 (UTC) (I got notice of an edit conflict as I submitted the above, Mwalimu. Great minds!)