2008/10/2 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com:
"Do no harm for the sake of doing harm" covers it, I suppose.
But then, that falls under the all-time number-one guideline in this field: "don't be a dick"...
Actually, historically, "don't be such a cunt" trumps that easily. We really don't need to get into measurement contests, nor irritation contests, nor "bon mot" contests.
Really that furthers nothing. And I explicitly include here contests on who can be more aggrieved or insulted by verbiage on the mailing lists. Come on, be adults.
I fear you miss my point, which was not to test anyone's level of irritation - I have been carefully not sending any such posts recently :-) - but to actually make a point about what we're meaning by "do no harm".
Let's recap, hopefully more clearly this time:
"Do no harm" clearly doesn't mean "don't do anything that could be harmful" - the example of writing about a high-profile convict's crime being construed as "harming" them further, for example, is clearly not an approach we want to take!
What it does encompass is *unnecessary* harm - harm we do not have to do but choose to do, such as finding out that the convict in question had a previously obscure bad relationship twenty years ago and quoting the aggrieved ex at length, rather than just not mentioning it and treating it as editorially irrelevant. Insisting on including derogatory material for its own sake and where sober editorial judgement would argue otherwise? That's the kind of thing we're really thinking of, the kind of thing we're worried about.
And, yes, we could invoke "do no harm" here, calling it "do no harm for its own sake" or "do no harm unless it's important" or the like. But my point there was that we, the broad editing community, *already* have a generally accepted approach to this sort of motivated insistence on the content of an article - and, well, we consider it a bad thing. Historically, we looked at those people and said "don't be a dick" rather than "do no harm" - it applied when they wanted to include negative material but it also applied when they wanted to remove it, as well as many other cases.
We may usually phrase it differently, and we may not even conceptualise it as a rule much, but it's still the general view - and when we have a very basic community norm, having an ambiguously worded rule to express a special case of it seems likely to cause more trouble than it solves.
(I am not sure what all this actually makes my view on BLP. I think I endorse the spirit but have no idea how to make a rule workable...)