Jossi Fresco wrote:
Jimbo's comment about "Most of us do care passionately about the ethics of what we are doing, and how it affects people" is worthy of being featured prominently somewhere in our policy pages.
Ethics, as always, is a complex subject. There are many people that are potentially affected by Wikipedia. Jimbo correctly points out that the subjects of biographical articles are among them. However also among them are readers or potential readers of content. At least some subset of us participate in Wikipedia out of an ethical concern that information availability should be levelled. Therefore some of us are worried that competing ethical concerns that others place higher will compromise that one that I at least consider primary.
Of course, some concerns are complementary---information is no good if it's disinformation, and so strongly promoting a culture of citing sources serves both ends at the same time. Some suggestions that we leave out "unimportant" but true facts are a little more problematic, though, and suggestions that we shouldn't be able to have open discussions during the article-writing process are even more problematic.
-Mark