[WikiEN-l] English Wikipedia Policy as sovereign law

[Delirium]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 1:02 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I am Person A, so I will attempt to clarify what I was saying.
>>  Basically, there is a difference between "This is what we should do"
>>  and "This is how we should do it". We have policies on what kind of
>>  content is acceptable (WP:V, WP:NPOV, etc.) and then we have a
>>  separate policy on how we deal with content that doesn't (and can't)
>>  meet those criteria (WP:DELETE, probably - my knowledge of shortcuts
>>  is failing me!). "We should not do harm" is a matter of content and
>>  that should be kept separate to matters of procedure.
>>     
>
> No,  a dislike of causing harm should be an element of basic human
> decency.  It's not up for policy to decide.
>
> Ultimately the outcomes, both short and long-term, must be considered
> anytime procedure is applied.  A long time fundamental tenant of
> Wikipedia is that you don't apply a procedure when you know it's the
> wrong thing to do.

There's a difference between using "avoid harm" as a heuristic to
prioritize work, and using it as an actual criterion for what an ideal
article content should contain. Some of the BLP folks appear to want the
latter, whereas I strongly feel that whether someone is alive or not, or
whether it would harm someone or not, shouldn't have an effect on the
content---either the information should or shouldn't go in the article
based on concerns wholly separate from whether it would be harmful or
not to put it there.

However, it could well have an effect on what order we work on
things---incorrect allegations that are not widely supported (and
perhaps have even been refuted) are certainly more pressing to correct
than getting someone's date of birth wrong. And incorrect allegations
about a living person are more pressing to correct than incorrect
allegations about an ancient Roman (not a hypothetical example---we have
at least one article on an ancient Roman that flatly says he committed
a murder that modern historians no longer think he committed). But
this is just a matter of what order we fix articles, not really
anything to do with what *should* go in an article, since the other
things should be fixed eventually too.

This sort of thing isn't unique to biographies of living people
either; similar principles apply to inflammatory, incorrect
information about current national or ethnic disputes, for example,
or grossly incorrect information in health-related articles.

-Mark