On 4/19/07, Doc glasgow doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
There is a flaw in your moral relativism. Hijacking planes and slamming them into buildings, lynching blacks, screwing pre-pubescent boys, and gassing Jews have all be considered perfectly valid options by certain people in certain cultural contexts. Would we list the methods by which one might do such things in a morally-disinterested manner?
Certainly. Of course we would also list the techniques people have found effective in preventing the above from happening
Is that what NPOV demands? Is that responsible?
I think this falls under the security by obscurity debate.
Further, if it is wrong to limit information on suicide because wikipedia is culturally amoral, why should your proviso "without crippling yourself or others" stand? It too is a value-judgement? Why not include methods that are designed to cause maximum devastation?
We do [[kamikaze]].
Yes, policy says Wikipedia is 'not censored', but our policies were never intended to be 'suicide pacts' that had to be followed to their logical conclusions no matter how absurd. Policy is no substitute for good judgement. And anyone who thinks we can make decisions in wikipedia without using 'subjectivity' just isn't living in the real world. Or perhaps they want to programme bots to make content decisions....
Orphanbot has being doing that for ages.
Having said all of that, I'm not sure this article actually does give me great cause for concern. But we should retain our basic humanity and cultural sensitivity when we make decisions like this.
It has been said that information is not intrinsically good or evil but rather the use.