On 6/5/07, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/5/07, Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)waterwiki.info> wrote:
We must work to strike a moral balance between to
good of knowledge
being available and the possible evil of harming others.
It is impossible to know which bits of information cause damage it is
impossible to quantify the damage and again impossible to quantify the
good.
The field of science has been dealing with this problem for some time.
The position of arguing that information is neither intrinsically good
nor evil appears to be the only sustainable option.
I have to say I completely disagree with that. Maybe these things can't be
quantified numerically, but I don't think we'll ever live in a society which
can handle giving all information to all people. I forget who it was that
said it, but someone in here mentioned that Wikipedia is fortunate to be
constrained by certain external forces (mostly laws) which discourage us
from truly printing every fact known to man. I'll add that Wikipedia's
policy against original research and in favor of using reliable sources
saves us from considering a lot more bad ideas. I'd hate to see some of the
arguments that would go on without these constraints.