somniloquence

In fact, this is also the professional opinion of archivists, who believe strongly in selection, as well as respecting the privacy and ownership rights of creators, and also basic safety.

And while professional archives can be aggressive about collecting materials within their collection policy, basic access restrictions in most archives often default to "death of the creator plus some number of decades" even for non-sensitive materials, just to protect the creator. When I worked in an academic archives we turned down people who tried to give us materials we thought would limit someone's safety (oral histories of people in a war zone; an interview with an individual in an unsafe setting who said "hey, could you expunge that bit, I shouldn't have said that" which the interviewer refused to expunge). We wouldn't even take them into our archives because we couldn't guarantee privacy. And, in fact, when Boston College had a collection of oral histories with IRA members seized by the justice department leading to the arrest of Gerry Adams, the Society for American Archivsts blamed BC, not the feds. (For collecting the oral histories in the first place, and for asserting in their agreements with interviewees that their interviews would be private, when there is no legal confessional wall for archives!)

While fannish curation of history is great, a real fannish archives will be running out of an institution with a strict code of ethics, not out of a crowd-sourced wiki. Which is not to say I don't love Fanlore. I adore Fanlore, in fact! But defending it with vague words about archives and Samuel Pepys is disingenuous, because it's not an archival collection, and if it were, it would subscribe to ethical rules. And those would, as Ces says, include context (as a basic minimum standard!), selection, and the right to restricted access.

(Gwyn, I hope you don't mind me turning up here as a stranger to say, hey, as a professional, I support you.)

(I have more complex feelings about the right to be forgotten; we once had to take down an issue of the student newspaper because it had printed rape allegations about a student in the 1990s which were now discoverable online because of OCR'd student newspapers, and the alumnus in question sued. And while usually I am on the side of people about whom information becomes easily discoverable in the age of full-text search, I feel differently when it is an article in a newspaper.)