On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Ken Arromdeearromdee@rahul.net wrote:
On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, stevertigo wrote:
More generally, my point is that the reasoning offered for the censorship is intellectually bankrupt.
Well let's not attribute to malice what better can be ascribed to corporate do-gooderness. Obviously, if the NYT, in presenting themselves to media, represented their case as being a tactic rather than simply a gesture of compliance, then they now have a little issue of journalistic integrity with everyone they dealt with.
That gets back to something I notied a while earlier:
Letting the newspaper decide that the harm done by suppressing information is less than the benefit of helping the prisoner survive, when the prisoner is a newspaper reporter, *is a conflict of interest*. We can't rely on the New York Times to make an unbiased, fairly presented, argument for weighing the two options when they're trying to protect one of their own reporters.
It's not just the Times' fault for not having the journalistic integrity to describe the situation accurately, it's ours for trusting them. We *shouldn't* trust someone with a conflict of interest. The fact that we did so shows that we don't have a good enough grasp on what it means to have a conflict of interest.
Some things are not easily describable and modelable in the in-wiki mental model and process.
We do badly enough on breaking news without introducing "our coverage may put a life at risk" as an additional complication.
We are not currently prepared to be entirely community-wide consensusly responsible and ethical and consistent about some news stories which are actively evolving. We're not supposed to be doing that anyways. We're an encyclopedia (WP, at least), not a news source. We do other things badly. Applying our "build an encyclopedia" logic, ethics, structure, consensus to other types of information may work particularly badly.