[Steppes] Plea for the SCA

Diane Rudin serena1570 at yahoo.com
Wed Apr 23 18:54:25 PDT 2003


--- Timothy Rayburn <timothy at elfsea.net> wrote:

> I would encourage tact in all communications, but I also suggest that
> sometimes comments like this will happen because it is a training
> tool.  Also, I would note that commentary has gotten much better over
> the last decade, there were times it was much more brazen.

Back when internal commentary was, well, internal, yeah, we let loose
with some pretty pungent comments.  They were as nothing compared to
what we said out loud at meetings.  If the old commentary from back
then is now being placed on-line, they are making public that which was
never intended for widespread distribution.  It was made by heralds,
for heralds.  If the old commentary from back then has been placed
on-line, that is a violation of the terms under which those comments
were written in the first place.

There is a belief amongst many chroniclers and webmasters that anything
they find in their files is fair game for publishing.  This is flat
wrong.  Nothing from before the creation of the publication release
form can and/or should be published.  I have fallen victim to this
practice more than once myself, and by this practice, old articles I
wrote, which contain errors of understanding and/or errors of fact have
been republished without my permission, and without any effort being
made to contact me for that permission.  By this, old mistakes are
perpetuated, and the appearance is created that I still subscribe to
those mistaken beliefs, when I have since corrected those errors.  I'd
be happy to update things if people would bother to contact me--but
they don't.

I can understand that people might believe that "they're public
records, so they're fair game."  No-one who wrote commentary in the old
days had any expectation or belief that they would be read by anyone
outside the college.  To place these online now is a violation of the
original understanding as regards distribution of those comments.

Old commentary from before the days of internet distribution should be
removed from the website, as the writers of the commentary never
consented to distribution of their comments outside the confines of the
college.

Look at what has already happened:  someone thinks that we still talk
like that, even though this stuff is from years ago.

--Serena,
who's going to look into public records access law tonight

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