2008/10/2 Nathan <nawrich(a)gmail.com>om>: It was in there as a "rule of thumb" for a long time. We eventually managed to get it out. -- geni

2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com>om>: We have an article [[Tank Man]]. The Chinese government probably takes the view that it harms their countries stability. I suspect [[Gary Glitter]] would argue that our article harms him. Reality is a well known BLP violation. -- geni

2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com>om>: Err yes we are. You may be hurting the Chinese government right now. You may not have a problem with hurting the Chinese government but that runs into problems with the do no harm approach. Do no harm is not a useful tool or guide because it can so trivially be shown to be flawed (mostly through cases of where any action causes some harm but also through showing than any action causes hard). Greatest good for the greatest number is slightly more robust but runs into issues with individual liberties. --- geni

2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com>om>: "Do no harm" isn't really part of basic ethics outside wicca. About the only other area would be the Hippocratic Oath and that is losing popularity. -- geni

2008/10/2 Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net>et>: Some of the evidence based medicine people. Obviously surgeons have always had issues with it. -- geni

On 10/2/08, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86(a)comcast.net> wrote: [[Iatrogenesis]] is the ten-dollar word for this (of which medacaid will pay a buck-fifty on a good day). In medical record-keeping jargon, doctor fuck-ups are referred to as an "adverse event", that is, if they are reported at all. Annually (as of 2000) the FDA estimates 44,000 to 98,000 deaths from medical error in the U.S.[1] and the British Medical Journal estimates 1,000,000 injuries[2]. That's right, doctors kill more people than cars, guns, drugs, and STDs. Of course W's immediate response was "Gee, let's limit the maximum awardable money for medical malpractice suits..." My conclusion is that unless you're about to die anyway, you might be better off not going to a doctor. Back on topic, while the "do no harm" slogan may have significant merit at face value, I worry that the disturbingly ironic medical undertones make it difficult for the average user to take seriously. In the end, this nutshell-ism might do us more harm than good. —C.W. [1] http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2000/500_err.html [2] http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1117772

There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm." And I believe that in fact, there is. Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that raises the most serious ethical quandaries. We remain the largest collaborative website in the world, which often produces the top-ranking search result when people look up information on a given individual. I will be dismayed if anyone still believes that the potential harm that our articles may cause to their living subjects by, for example, invading the privacy of borderline-notable living people, is something that should receive no attention in making our content decisions. It would be intolerable for the project to willfully harm innocent people by operating in this manner. Newyorkbrad On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 9:36 AM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

2008/10/2 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) <newyorkbrad(a)gmail.com>om>: "Do no harm for the sake of doing harm" covers it, I suppose. But then, that falls under the all-time number-one guideline in this field: "don't be a dick"... -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk

2008/10/2 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com>om>: I fear you miss my point, which was not to test anyone's level of irritation - I have been carefully not sending any such posts recently :-) - but to actually make a point about what we're meaning by "do no harm". Let's recap, hopefully more clearly this time: "Do no harm" clearly doesn't mean "don't do anything that could be harmful" - the example of writing about a high-profile convict's crime being construed as "harming" them further, for example, is clearly not an approach we want to take! What it does encompass is *unnecessary* harm - harm we do not have to do but choose to do, such as finding out that the convict in question had a previously obscure bad relationship twenty years ago and quoting the aggrieved ex at length, rather than just not mentioning it and treating it as editorially irrelevant. Insisting on including derogatory material for its own sake and where sober editorial judgement would argue otherwise? That's the kind of thing we're really thinking of, the kind of thing we're worried about. And, yes, we could invoke "do no harm" here, calling it "do no harm for its own sake" or "do no harm unless it's important" or the like. But my point there was that we, the broad editing community, *already* have a generally accepted approach to this sort of motivated insistence on the content of an article - and, well, we consider it a bad thing. Historically, we looked at those people and said "don't be a dick" rather than "do no harm" - it applied when they wanted to include negative material but it also applied when they wanted to remove it, as well as many other cases. We may usually phrase it differently, and we may not even conceptualise it as a rule much, but it's still the general view - and when we have a very basic community norm, having an ambiguously worded rule to express a special case of it seems likely to cause more trouble than it solves. (I am not sure what all this actually makes my view on BLP. I think I endorse the spirit but have no idea how to make a rule workable...) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk