[WikiEN-l] News agencies are not RSs

[Ken Arromdee]

On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, George Herbert wrote:
> > 2) Not publishing the story and then creating an issue after the fact, makes
> > such tactics unlikely to be successful in the future. Tactics have the
> > problem of being exactly that - overt and discernible forms of movement that
> > after study can be countered. That's again assuming that these tactics were
> > substantially contributive to any success in this case.
> 
> You're assuming that terrorists and professional kidnappers in the
> hinterland of Afghanistan have networks that include sophisticated
> Wikipedia and web history analysis experts.  This is true for some
> organizations - but not many.  The level of ignorance of advanced
> information sources is suprising even among groups that use some
> advanced high-tech tools such as websites and encrypted internet
> communications.

This reasoning sounds good, but is not consistent with what we hear whenever
we want to remove information from Wikipedia to help protect a person, but the
person isn't as well connected to the media as a newspaper reporter.  When
we want to protect a non-reporter, we are told that since Wikipedia is just
republishing information that is already out there and causing damage
anyway, the person will probably have been hurt just as much without the
Wikipedia article.  And of course, Wikipedia is not censored, and that
the five pillars of Wikipedia require the free flow of information and can
never be compromised.

Certainly, someone who tried to suppress information in the same way, but was
not Jimmy Wales or otherwise important on Wikipedia, even if they did it to
save a life, would be accused of edit warring, told that they are abusing
the rules, and taken to Arbcom and banned.  Of course, in the process they
would be told that their idea that they are saving a life is speculative and
can't be proven.  If one such person were to justify their actions by
claiming that terrorists can't use the Internet well, we would reply "nice
idea, but you really have no proof for that.  You're just speculating.  You
don't know that that's true.  Now stop the edit warring and the rules abuse--
we can certainly prove *that*."

You're making a good case that publishing information can harm someone.  But
this same good case has been made countless other times and it's never been
accepted, saving a life or not.