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Comment by mrighele | Hacker News Reader

> There's a tricky ethical question here: if someone changed their name and ask for not being called their former name ever again, you can either ignore their will, which is rude, or chose to follow it but then you are doing a disservice to the public's understanding.

Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things. Using the fact that the former is seen as rude by some to avoid the second is in my opinion just an example of the level of extremism of the pro-trans activists.

But if in fact it made sense, shouldn't we completely remove any reference of the previous name also from the pages of people like Yusuf Islam [1] or Muhammad Ali [2] ?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_Stevens

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Ali

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Notability. Those two celebrities were known for a very long time under their old name. To prevent confusion, their old name is shown.

The victim of a crime was not notable before their name change.

Notability is subjective

In the Universe, yes. In the closed system of Wikipedia, no, it's a well defined term with clearly established criteria, tested over the years on thousands of Talk pages on controversial pages, of how to achieve consensus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

Many married women are known under their husbands last names, from Maria Salomea Skłodowska, Betty Marion Ludden to Melanija Knavs. Some celebrities even use stage names, such as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.

Many of these women are not really known under those names, but somehow, they're still listed on their wiki pages.

Most of the married women on Wikipedia didn't get the choice of keeping their own name, so we cannot really compare it to someone who changed their name.

Same for stage names, people don't use stage name because they want to escape their former name, they use stage names because it's cool.

And when people use a pseudonym and want to keep their real identity secret for personal reasons, their name doesn't appear on Wikipedia, and nobody is ever complaining about that! It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…

But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.

> It's as if people were obsessed by trans people in particular…

Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names, except if the person was trans for some reason. Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.

> Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia

Nope. When it's an unknown transgender person who died for being themselves, perhaps it's stupid to put the older name there. World renown Ellen Page is deadnamed right there at the top. Because they were known for decades worldwide under that name.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliot_Page

Why stupid? I mean... what do we gain by removing that info? Isn't more info better?

Melanija Knavs was not known under that name, and it's still there.

> Isn't more info better?

No.

The goal of an encyclopedia is to have a high signal/noise ratio. If you put literally everything on a subject on its page there, it becomes fundamentally useless.

And in that particular case, the only people you satisfy by putting the info there, are the bullies who caused their suicide.

> But it's not a secret, the name has been mentioned in mainsteam media on multiple occasions, and even here, in this thread on HN.

Most pseudonyms aren't real secrets either, plenty of people knew the real name or face of people posting under a pseudonym but that doesn't make it OK to post it on Wikipedia.

> Yet, they keep every other name on wikipedia, especially if we're talking about peoples legal names

Ah yes, “every other” except for the ones they don't. We've already talked about people with pseudonyms right here!

> Wikipedia is the one making exceptions here for one group in particular.

One group that happened to be harassed (and, unfortunately often, assaulted) for having changed their name in the first place, hence the “exception”: the group is exceptionally vulnerable.

> Calling somebody with his former name and mentioning his former name in a Wikipedia page are two completely different things

Except when people keep vandalizing Wikipedia renaming people there with their dead name. And yes it happens over and over and over again.

Because the most active extremists on the topic are by far the anti-trans crowd. (And it's not even close, there are trans people assaulted every week, sometimes going as far as murder this is extremism).

And again, Wikipedia keeps mentioning the former name when it's necessary (look for Bradley Manning on Wikipedia, the page redirects to Chelsea Manning but the old name is state because it's important).

According to MOS:GENDERID [1], a person's former name can be used when they were notable under that name. You're trying to make it out as if there's some nefarious double standard when there's not, editors just want Wikipedia to be clear and encyclopedic.

It's incredible that in a discussion about brutal violence against a child, the child victim is being painted as the "extremist"!

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Biog...

People are downvoting factual comments like this then talk about “trans-activist extremism”…

Strong “Don't contradict my opinions with facts” vibe.

> level of extremism of the pro-trans activists

What on earth are you talking about?

Sometimes it easier to downvote that Earthian than to argue.

The use of the masculine pronoun here when we're referring to someone who transitioned from male kind of gives away that you're probably less concerned with searchability and preservation of history, and more concerned with promoting a transphobic agenda. I suppose it's possible you were using it as a generic pronoun, but in that case I would have expected "they." Am I wrong?

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