Training modules/Dealing with online harassment/slides/handling-pii-on-wiki

Handling personal information: Handling PII on-wiki

You may be asked to handle PII that is posted in a variety of locations, deliberately or otherwise. It isn't always with malicious intent. Sometimes a person will post something about themselves on a project without realizing how public that page is. Or perhaps someone mentions a link between another user and their PII that they thought was known, but it wasn't. No matter the intentions of the person who posted it, PII that isn't willingly divulged generally needs to be handled with caution and removed and suppressed as necessary.

PII can be revealed on Wikimedia project noticeboards and talk pages, such as those used for mediation. This is not always done maliciously. Some examples of accidental publication of PII might include:

Someone attempting to make a link between a user and their location, their employer, or an IP address to prove a point in a debate;
Someone referring to another person by name (assuming the other person had not publicly linked this to their account);
Someone uploading an image of an event that shows another user and their name badge, thus connecting a user to their real name, or that contains the user's real name in the tags or metadata.

In all of these cases, even if no action is merited against the person who made the edits, the edits themselves should be suppressed. Refer to the "Immediate action" section of the Fundamentals module for more information.

There is also the additional possibility of articles being used in harassment of this variety. This is of particular concern when the harassment is targeting an individual with a Wikipedia article of their own. Most of the time, such targets are fairly low-profile, if notable, individuals. Most projects' policies on biographies of living people contain information on how to treat articles on people such as this. Situations involving articles such as these might include:

Posting home addresses or phone numbers into infoboxes or article text;
Inserting unsourced or false material that is controversial or purports to reveal personal details (usually where those details are excessive – details of divorces, children's dates of birth...);
Adding links to unreliable websites or blogs that reveal previously unpublished or unverified personal details

Be wary of treating article content issues as harassment. Undue weight given to sourced content – such as criticisms or controversies – is a different matter and ought to be handled with on-wiki discussion.