Hatred leads to murder. Murder is bad. But should Wikipedia officially oppose hatred? Or mass murder?
Given that Jimbo regularly intersperses his mailing list posts with terms like "WikiLove" and urges us all to communicate cordially, perhaps a time will come when Wikipedia can move from near-anarchy and/or benign dictatorship to some sort of constitutional democracy. If so, a statement of values may be necessary.
Values inform rules. We can't just make up rules out of the thin air, and voting on them won't work if for no other reason than ballot-stuffing can't be tracked.
Yet the mainstay of Wikipedia's conflict resolution policy, indeed the only thing that allows it to be an open WIKI, is that all views are tolerated; i.e., no view is endorsed when there's a controversy. We all hesitate to tamper with this policy that has served us so well. But it has its weaknesses.
* There's no way to stop people from their Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic rants. * The debate over mass murder (i.e., "genocide") carried out by Communist regimes always causes deadlock via page protection and bannings.
I mean, if hate and murder are such problems maybe we should officially label them as "bad".
Ed Poor (speaking for myself)