Yes, cataloging is the basic way of discrimination about what's important. We see what's there and we sort it out. As we are interested into providing an encyclopedia for reading as well as reference, and not just a biographical database, we need to sort biographies into manageable units, which means selecting the ones important enough to any significant group of the users of the encyclopedia to be worth the attention. We are not writing it as a Book of judgement, we are writing it just as a non-authoritative online encyclopedia for the purpose of being used. We are not judging DB, or anyone else. We are recording what is said about people for the befit of those who will read it.
Some of the arguments here seem to be taking WP too seriously. We want to be used, so we want to be --and be perceived as being -- objective, and fair, and reasonable, and unprejudiced and uncensored. Those are the principles on which we should form our ethics.
On 6/20/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
geni wrote:
I think it's good that we recognise that there is an ethical question involved in such an act. It isn't as neutral an act of cataloguing as we sometimes like to pretend.
Cataloguing runs into the "wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information"
What's indiscriminate about cataloguing?
Ec
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