Fred Bauder wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: Delirium [mailto:delirium@hackish.org] Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2007 06:16 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as moral tool?
Fred Bauder wrote:
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.
It's not at all impossible. Detailed information about private people is harmful. Even excessively detailed information about public figures. publishing private phone numbers of celebrities is an obvious pain in the ass. We don't need to know if George Bush has Herpes. People have a right to live without a spotlight turned on them. Likewise detailed information about how to kill people is rather obviously harmful. None of the statements you made are true. Rough approximations may be arrived at with respect to all 3.
The rough approximations vary widely according to cultural norms, though, which poses quite a problem for Wikipedia since we're an international enyclopedia, rather than situated in any one culture. We don't need to know if George Bush has Herpes, perhaps; do we need to know that FDR had polio? The consensus for many years was that this was private information that would be inappropriate to publicize against his wishes. However, more recently, it's been mentioned more widely, and we mention it in our own article. There are probably still people who find that distasteful, but what are we supposed to do about that?
I think that we can probably all agree on the extremes (e.g. home phone numbers), but it gets murky quickly past that. For example, some countries prohibit publishing the names of various categories of alleged criminals, or various categories of alleged victims, whereas other countries' press does so routinely; which standard do we follow?
-Mark
We follow a reasonable standard that we arrive at though the same process we arrive at any policy, discussion leading to consensus.
Fred
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Which presupposes that such a discussion is -allowed to take place-, and does not have a predetermined outcome before it even begins. I agree myself we shouldn't be publishing home addresses or phone numbers. But in addition to being potentially unethical, it's unencyclopedic anyway. There's no tension there at all, there's no reason we -should- do that.
Not so clear-cut, with the recent BLP stuff. Is QZ encyclopedic? I think so, it's a reliably-sourced look at how emergent Internet phenomena started up and took place. Is Allison Stokke encyclopedic? Well...I'm a little more on the fence on that one, but again, it was studied by at least the Washington Post, and apparently several other sources, as an example of the same type of phenomenon. We certainly wouldn't exclude reliable studies of the causes behind the LA riots or World War I, and I think both of those articles did go beyond mere titillation and a good case could be made that they did indeed have an encyclopedic purpose. It wasn't just "Brian PEPAZ lololol" at all.
Now, with QZ, the article should be titled by the name of the meme, not by his name, but his name should be a redirect. With Allison Stokke, I imagine a different title could be come up with as well, or it could even go into a larger article regarding the subject in general of people who have received unwanted publicity due to becoming an Internet meme. Again, though, the name should be a redirect.
I agree we shouldn't generally have "biographies" of people which are really only a description of a small part of their lives. An article about an event should be titled with the name of the event, we don't need a separate pseudo-biography on every participant in it. On the other hand, there quite often does get to be enough information on people to write a genuine biography, even if they became notable by chance or circumstances outside their control. (See the Richard Jewell article, for an example.)
Sometimes, being a comprehensive encyclopedia will mean reporting on things people will find upsetting, disturbing, shocking, distasteful, or offensive. Now, we shouldn't -actively seek- to report such things when they're not genuinely encyclopedic. As Jimbo said, we're not a tabloid. But we also shouldn't hesitate to report them when they really are an encyclopedic and appropriate subject. A lot of people, including me, would certainly find child porn, lolicon, racism, neo-Nazism, and many such things disgusting and distasteful. But we certainly should still have articles on them. I find what happened to Allison Stokke to be pretty disgusting, but a pretty good case can be made that we should have an article on it. "Sensitivity", especially since it sounds so nice, is a very easy thing to take way, way too far. NPOV is sometimes going to mean being insensitive. And when the two clash, NPOV should win.
(As a side note, when I'm on the -inclusionist- side of something, something is very likely wrong...)