2008/10/2 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkbrad@gmail.com:
There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm." And I believe that in fact, there is. Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that raises the most serious ethical quandaries. We remain the largest collaborative website in the world, which often produces the top-ranking search result when people look up information on a given individual. I will be dismayed if anyone still believes that the potential harm that our articles may cause to their living subjects by, for example, invading the privacy of borderline-notable living people, is something that should receive no attention in making our content decisions. It would be intolerable for the project to willfully harm innocent people by operating in this manner.
Definitely, which is why we have a BLP policy at all - our living bios can profoundly affect the real lives of people in the real world. It's hard to reduce this to mechanistic rules.
- d.