Talk:Private message

Legality question

Hi all, is it possible for someone to answer my question regarding 'Private Messages' on forums?

Is it illegal/legal for Administrators to view member's PM's on a forum if a problem is suspected or pointed out to them by another member?

Cheers, Pete.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.163.132.251 (talk) 22:06, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

Wikipedia

Does wikipedia have pms? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.133.193.100 (talk) 02:55, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

kind of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Emailing_users cregox (T | C) 08:14, Thursday 2019-10-17 (UTC) 08:14, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

The wikipedia page that we’re editing is “personal message,” We will be adding 5 sections to this page: introduction, history, real life application, controversy, and source citations. We have already found a pretty expansive list of sources and are working towards typing up each section.— Preceding unsigned comment added by Cszutsen (talk • contribs)

Peer Review

I like this article especially the introduction paragraph. Editors give a well-round definition of PM(personal message) and precisely grasp two key characteristics of personal message, privacy and efficiency. However, some parts of the article might need to be more clear and complete.

First, the introduction part in some degree separated personal message into two types: social platforms and private messaging services. It may neglect that some social platforms have private messaging services and private messaging services also have some sort of social aspect function. These two types are hard to distinguish because each has the other's characteristics.

Second, the history part concentrates too much on emails and social media. As a result, letters, telegraph or other kind of personal messages are not mentioned in the article. If editors can add history of other possible types of personal messages to the this part, readers will have the opportunity to get more complete and comprehensive information from this.

Third, "Social media" section and "Etiquette of personal messaging" can be combined into one section like "modern personal messages" to cover a wider range of topics of personal messages and avoid unclarity caused by those two highly related sections.

Despite some tiny problems, you guys did a really good job. Good luck to your rest of the course. Wzc369Wzc369 (talk) 20:57 24 March 2014 (UTC)

i'm also kind of new to editing articles here, but you could probably just do it yourself, you know... looks like over 5 years have passed and there was little to no editions, given what you speak about here is still relevant today, so it's kind of a shame nobody bothered to do it so far!

i, for one, won't. i'm already glad you commented though, because it gives very good insight in things that i intuitively knew that could be fixed or improved there. so, i actually just wanted to say a very long thank you!

and cheers. :) cregox (T | C) 08:19, Thursday 2019-10-17 (UTC) 08:19, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

personal, private or direct

i think the main article should focus on **direct message**.

for one, promoting dm over pm removes one point of confusion on the true definition. but above that, the whole point of dm is accessing people directly. notifying them, even, as much as possible.

some people might think it's about privacy, and in some cases or might be. but, matter of fact, the most direct way to reach someone is usually private as well. even when speaking into someone's ear, which is often done in a public setting, or in a private room, those are certain ways to get someone's attention. be direct. while online privacy isn't so strongly linked with dm, it's also and still not really the point. after all, data can be private and insecure. so, you probably would be looking for secure message, which would, again, miss the point of a dm for most use cases. all we really want when sending a message to someone or some people is that they'll get it, read it and understand it. as direct as possible. privacy and security might come together and be equally important, but it's not the case of all dm's.

and one might argue in favour of personal message, as to keep the status quo for one. but unless it's a dm to a single person, it's hard to argue it'll be a personal message. if we get 2 or more people in a room to give them a message, that's the most direct way to do it, and it's not necessarily personal to each one of them. i might not even know who i want to address in specific, i just know i want to be direct to all of them. and, online, this is just the same.

this also have lots of implications in how we structure ourselves and how we manage what kind of message reaches us. it's an important distinction for many aspects of our lives, in every sense! what's a pm as in personal or private. what should be a secure dm. and how all of them are still dm, above all. cregox (T | C) 08:36, Thursday 2019-10-17 (UTC) 08:36, 17 October 2019 (UTC)

@Cregox: Preference of "DM" over "PM" smacks of a bias towards social media / Discord culture as opposed to traditional forums/message boards / IRC culture. PM was almost universally used before, hence why it's the main form used in this article. Just because a bunch of hotshots want to create a new Internet culture, doesn't mean that we should enable them. Retronymic neologisms must face intense scrutiny before they are permitted to replace existing terms. 70.188.165.229 (talk) 22:29, 7 January 2021 (UTC)

I have to support cregox for 2 reasons. First, the social media culture you describe is the one we live in today, and DM is undoubtably the much more common term in 2021. Sure, some app developers made the call to use DM over PM, but it stuck, and that's the natural progression of culture, not the unilateral decision of "a bunch of hoshots." For that reason alone I would support moving the article to Direct message per WP:COMMONNAME. And second, as it stands the article is heavily focused on DMs in the social media sense. The words "forum" and "IRC" aren't even used in the article. So, if we're just going by the article contents, it still makes more sense to go with Direct message. — The Only Zac (talk) 02:30, 8 January 2021 (UTC)

First of all, not everyone plays the social media game, and plenty of people continue to use "PM". So to say that "we live in the social media culture", and thus PM is some dated term (or whatever it is exactly that you are alleging), you would have to presume that everyone uses social media and is a part of that culture. Not everyone does, and not everyone is.

Secondly, Wikipedia is not in the practice of opting for neologisms for article names over existing terms for arbitrary reasons. The article has been at "Personal message" since 2006, and PMs continue to be referred to as such by plenty of people every single day. I would suggest you mentally separate yourself from your personal social media bubble long enough that you are able to recognize that not everyone uses the same platforms every day that you do. 70.188.165.229 (talk) 02:45, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

The phrase "Direct message" has been around, and Google Ngram Viewer[1] shows that it even overtook "private pessage" from 2008 to 2011. As of 2019 it was on track to overtake both "Private" and "Personal". WP:COMMONNAME is not an "arbitrary reason".

But you're right, there are still widely used platforms that use PM over DM (Reddit comes to mind). Looking at the sources on the article, the majority of them refer to the topic generically as "private messages". Would you support a move to Private message? — The Only Zac (talk) 20:20, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

I'd support a move to the WP:COMMONNAME for the most widely-used generic term for these messages today, whatever that would be. What's a fair way to determine that?--Lord Belbury (talk) 19:20, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

Looking at the sources currently on this article, only two of them use "personal message" and the majority of them refer to the topic generically as "private messages". Google Ngram Viewer[2] also shows that Private message is the most popular (by a small margin) as of 2019. What do you think of that? — The Only Zac (talk) 20:20, 10 January 2021 (UTC)

"Private message" would be a perfectly fine article title, yes. 70.188.165.229 (talk) 00:50, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

Also fine with "private message". I don't think we can read much from the Ngram for "personal message", as the phrase is also used in many other contexts (and has been in a slow decline since the 1940s, by the look of it). --Lord Belbury (talk) 10:19, 11 January 2021 (UTC)

to add to both threads above, popularity shouldn't be the single criteria, as per [3]:

"Ambiguous or inaccurate names for the article subject, as determined in reliable sources, are often avoided"

private message is short for pm, which makes it ambiguous (it could mean private or personal).

also, allow to repeat myself, but a bit shorter: a direct message can be public and it's still a message directed at just 1 person. both PM and DM are almost equally widely recognised, but the shorter version DM in itself is also less ambiguous. finally, private message is conceptually different and less abrangent for the intended use: a DM can be a PM. but a PM might not be direct and doesn't even need to be for a single person nor does it matter if there are middle men in it. privacy is a complex topic. direct isn't.

ps: boy, this whole wikimedia interface on mobile, be it on a browser or the app, is rather terrible! -- 16:58, 20 January 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cregox (talk • contribs)

The ambiguity of the abbreviation doesn't matter here, as nobody is suggesting we name the article "PM". --Lord Belbury (talk) 11:11, 21 January 2021 (UTC)

I simply just want to know how to go about messaging private personal instant whichever, through Wikipedia? 1891LrV0809 (talk) 18:54, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

i never got enough (or any) notifications about this whole movement, so i have not followed it up and ended up here, today, by chance.

and i noticed the decision have been made, but i can't follow it up to understand how or why the settlement was over "private".

all i can think of is i read everything here and in the next chapter again today, about the change request on January 12th, i saw no single good logical argument in favour of "private", only the popularity argument, and it clearly was voted in favour of "private". was it because of the popularity argument? i don't know.

the message to me, however, is very clear. "both personal and direct message should be called private message".

and this is a mistake from the linguistic, etymology, and current definition and use of those words, as i already pointed.

it is also a lost opportunity to make it right, given that the popularity of both "direct" and "private" are virtually the same.

you may think you want privacy, but what you really want is freedom.

and you may think that more choice equals more freedom, but that's not always the case.

you will have difficulty to link all those ideas together, but i started this whole naming movement, meaning you all moved in this direction after what i've said...

something i wrote triggered inside of you a will to move in a similar direction. but, to me, you all completely missed the point i tried to make.

my fault.

above all, i couldn't get my point through. and now i've wrote this follow up manifesto, which will probably increase the confusion and chaos, as well as get zero continuation (on the movement) after a small back and forth.

too long! didn't read:

this shall eventually be called "direct message", because among those 3 options "DM" is the only logically consistent one.

what's more, an even better name would be simply "notify" as this already implies there will be a message and gives the proper action command that everyone seeks when trying to DM anyone... but even i know there might never come the right time to be so pedantic.

i won't push it forward anymore, as i am clearly completely incompetent to do what needs to be done here.

thank you all for the ride! 😘

(and sorry for that dude who is lost on april's fools, trying to find a way to direct message someone in wikipedia, thinking it will be either private or personal 🤣) cregox (talk) 08:09, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Requested move 12 January 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Consensus to move the article somewhere, and private message was preferred over direct message. A new move request to direct message is possible, and may be proposed immediately, as per WP:NOGOODOPTIONS (cue James Madison saying "which I wrote!") Red Slash 01:27, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

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Personal message → Private message – See section above for existing discussion regarding this move, with the main reason being WP:COMMONNAME. Looking at the sources currently on this article, only two of them use "personal message" and the majority of them refer to the topic generically as "private messages". Google Ngram Viewer[4] also shows that Private message is the most popular term as of 2019, while Personal message has been in steady decline for decades. — The Only Zac (talk) 21:33, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Courtesy pings: User:70.188.165.229, User:Lord Belbury, User:cregox, User:Barbara Shack — The Only Zac (talk) 21:33, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

• Support, particularly since Ngram is also including heavy usage of "personal message" in other contexts (eg. recent news story: "The Queen issues a rare personal message to one of her favourite radio programmes"), so internet-specific usage would be lower. --Lord Belbury (talk) 21:57, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
• Consider Direct message. Private messages have existed for thousands of years, but this article is more about post-1995 electronic messages. — BarrelProof (talk) 05:41, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

In the year 1995 and afterwards, "private message" was used by untold numbers of people to refer to PMs. I do not know what world you live in, but if you think that the term "DM/direct message" has been the standard since 1995, you obviously do not live on Earth. 70.188.165.229 (talk) 23:20, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

I don't understand your reasoning. The term "private message" was used in this context after 1995 and is still used on social media/forums to this day. — The Only Zac (talk) 00:29, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, "private message" is a term that has been used in this context after 1995. It has also been used outside of this context, both before and after 1995, and it therefore has an ambiguous meaning. Since it can refer to other topics, it may be insufficiently WP:PRECISE. However, the NGram data pointed out below (expanded to include post-1900), does seem to show that "direct message" could be ambiguous too. — BarrelProof (talk) 18:05, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

Private message may have been ambiguous in 1996, but not in 2021. If you're suggesting we leave it as-is, I would argue Personal message is the least common and most ambiguous of the three. — The Only Zac (talk) 20:58, 15 January 2021 (UTC)

• Oppose, and support alternative per WP:CRITERIA Support direct message. As BarrelProof says private messages have existed for millenia, so have personal messages, and still exist today. It must be possible for IT editors to title an article recognisably In ictu oculi (talk) 13:34, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

A longer NGram graph gives many centuries of history for "direct message" as well: particularly from God, and to and from monarchs. --Lord Belbury (talk) 14:21, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

Are you telling me that IT people (or even average joes) are not going to be able to understand what a PM is? Are they five years old, per chance? 70.188.165.229 (talk) 23:20, 13 January 2021 (UTC)

I originally came here in support of Direct message, but the sources convinced me that Private message is the more generic/common term. Private message already redirects here anyways, so it's not like "private message" is being confounded with some other kind of message. — The Only Zac (talk) 00:29, 14 January 2021 (UTC)

if my vote counts, after reading everything and pondering very little, i still vow for DM. (no idea how to properly sing this though, it's really broken). -- cregox 17:19, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi there cregox. Just to be clear, this isn't a vote so much as an opportunity for discussion. Comments that provide reasoning for why they support one way or another will be weighed more heavily when the final decision is made. That being said, I'm sure your original post in the section above will be taken into consideration.

As for how to sign your post, just type four ~ symbols at the end of your message before you press "Publish", like this

if my vote counts, after reading everything and pondering very little, i still vow for DM. ~~~~

Hope this helps! — The Only Zac (talk) 21:30, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

• Support Private message or Private message (social media). "Private message" has been used before social media existed, but with the same meaning: a non-public message. We could move to Private message (social media) to be more precise. "Direct message" has also been used before social existed, but with a different meaning: a straight and clear message. That is the meaning in a lot of google news search results (see [5]). Vpab15 (talk) 16:25, 24 January 2021 (UTC)
• Support (a move to "Private message"). I am glad that I found out about this. As far as I could always tell, private message has been the general standard for years. Most fellow forum users that I know interpret "PM" as "private message" as well. Regarding social media, I do not know much about what term social media uses because I do not use social media. Whatever term it is that is most used with social media, however, I definitely do not see why that ought to supersede the more common general term for the concept that is used everywhere else on the Internet. Tharthan (talk) 17:40, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

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The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Greater balance of information / improvement of the history section?

I noticed that this article seems to primarily only discuss PMs as they relate to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Even the history section doesn't actually talk about the evolution and development of PMs. Instead, it talks about the development of e-mail and instant messengers (which are individual in their communication by nature). It is almost as if the person who wrote that section wasn't particularly well aware of the history of the Internet pre-social-media. Tharthan (talk) 14:01, 11 February 2021 (UTC)