On 10/2/07, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There's no way we could know beforehand who those
people were among
us, though, and I would be very worried that a mass attempt to help
out online would turn out badly in an actual suicidal wikipedian
situation. How do we keep random nuts or helpful but clueless people
from doing something damaging by communicating with the user? The
only thing that accomplishes that is lock and block, and calling the
authorities however you can find them.
As an aside - As an analogy, for accidents and injuries, one of the
key first aid and first responder (EMT, Paramedic, Firefighter,
Police) training points is that bystanders are part of the problem in
an emergency and accident scene.
It takes either rare inclination plus some seasoning experience, or a
lot of experience, to get those people able to both react
appropriately at an incident scene and manage it to avoid getting
bystanders hurt, or having them further hurt someone already involved.
I have had "helpful" bystanders attempt to walk right into freeway
traffic to lay out flares at an accident scene, stand around for
minutes before communicating that there's a fire truck parked around
the corner which might be able to come help, and stand in the middle
of the road blocking traffic and the emergency vehicles trying to get
to an accident scene.
The same sorts of issues come up with psychological emergencies.
They're more subtle and harder for people to realize there's a
problem. That's particularly much a problem online, where most
people's sensitivity and emotional communications (both sending and
reading) is dulled.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com