William Pietri wrote:
Now let me be clear: I'm not saying we should try to run this place somehow without having any shared sense of values. I'm not sure it's possible, and I surely don't want to try. My concern here is the potential for becoming something different than a neutral provider of factual information, becoming other than the distillation of what responsible people have studied responsibly.
I feel like both some recent BLP activity and the proposed "attack sites" policy take us away from NPOV. They actively suppress factual information that people can get elsewhere to impose our values on our readers. Is modern society not sensitive enough to privacy concerns? Well, we'll cut out names that appear in CNN and on the AP newswire. Does someone not agree that the Internet's most popular information source should be run by people who keep their identities secret? Suppress mention of them.
I'm not saying that these choices are right or wrong. What I'm saying that I'm worried about us becoming comfortable with arguments of the form of "We disapprove of X so we shouldn't give our readers the facts, even if they can look it up on a hundred other sites."
This is the most articulate demonstration of the issue I have seen yet. I wish I had your gift.
Thank you.
-Jeff