Did the person who consulted the article end up going through with their intentions ?
People searching for this subject material are going to be, in many/most cases, in need of help.
Perhaps there is an opportunity here to leave the page without the methods and post a note that community doesn't feel comfortble posting such material and then linking to various support services.
Sort of a honey trap to help people in need... Thinking outside the box here.
Best j --------------- Jason@Calacanis.com | 310-456-4900 www.calacanis.com
on 4/19/07 6:51 PM, Jason McCabe Calacanis at jason@calacanis.com wrote:
People searching for this subject material are going to be, in many/most cases, in need of help.
Perhaps there is an opportunity here to leave the page without the methods and post a note that community doesn't feel comfortble posting such material and then linking to various support services.
Sort of a honey trap to help people in need... Thinking outside the box here.
Best j
Jason,
Excellent insight; and excellent, excellent idea!
Marc Riddell
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 4/19/07 6:51 PM, Jason McCabe Calacanis at jason@calacanis.com wrote:
People searching for this subject material are going to be, in many/most cases, in need of help.
Perhaps there is an opportunity here to leave the page without the methods and post a note that community doesn't feel comfortble posting such material and then linking to various support services.
Sort of a honey trap to help people in need... Thinking outside the box here.
Best j
Jason,
Excellent insight; and excellent, excellent idea!
I'd have no problem with including a few links to support services somewhere in the article, but this is not really Wikipedia's responsibility and the information content of the page shouldn't suffer as a result. Should web sites dedicated to depressing poetry or handguns also blank their content and replace it with suicide prevention counselling?
Bear in mind that a good many people who consult this article are not necessarily themselves suicidal. There are people out there who are writing school essays or reports that cover the topic, or people who heard about some celebrity suicide and are curious about how others have done it, or people who are writing works of fiction and need some ideas for how a character might kill himself, etc. Wikipedia is here to serve all of these people too and what they need is a high-quality encyclopedia article packed with useful NPOV information about the subject.
on 4/19/07 6:51 PM, Jason McCabe Calacanis at jason@calacanis.com wrote:
People searching for this subject material are going to be, in many/most cases, in need of help.
Perhaps there is an opportunity here to leave the page without the methods and post a note that community doesn't feel comfortble posting such material and then linking to various support services.
Sort of a honey trap to help people in need... Thinking outside the box here.
Best j
Marc Riddell wrote:
Jason,
Excellent insight; and excellent, excellent idea!
Jason,
I still stand by your idea. It is the most sensitive and sensible alternative presented yet.
Marc
on 4/19/07 12:01 PM, Bryan Derksen at bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I'd have no problem with including a few links to support services somewhere in the article, but this is not really Wikipedia's responsibility and the information content of the page shouldn't suffer as a result.
It it the very information content of the page that I'm in dispute with.
Should web sites dedicated to depressing poetry or handguns also blank their content and replace it with suicide prevention counselling?
C'mon, Bryan, isn't that reaching just a bit ;-).
Bear in mind that a good many people who consult this article are not necessarily themselves suicidal. There are people out there who are writing school essays or reports that cover the topic, or people who heard about some celebrity suicide and are curious about how others have done it, or people who are writing works of fiction and need some ideas for how a character might kill himself, etc. Wikipedia is here to serve all of these people too and what they need is a high-quality encyclopedia article packed with useful NPOV information about the subject.
You make a good point here. Right now I don't have an answer to it. I just know that a "how-to" article on suicide seems very wrong to me.
Marc
Marc Riddell wrote:
on 4/19/07 12:01 PM, Bryan Derksen at bryan.derksen@shaw.ca wrote:
I'd have no problem with including a few links to support services somewhere in the article, but this is not really Wikipedia's responsibility and the information content of the page shouldn't suffer as a result.
It it the very information content of the page that I'm in dispute with.
Then the dispute is likely unresolvable. Wikipedia is all about providing encyclopedic information, which I consider this to be. It's not censored.
Should web sites dedicated to depressing poetry or handguns also blank their content and replace it with suicide prevention counselling?
C'mon, Bryan, isn't that reaching just a bit ;-).
My point is that those sites are also likely ones for suicidal people to visit and may even provide information that ends up facilitating the act. And like Wikipedia, they're not responsible for what their readers do with that information.
Bear in mind that a good many people who consult this article are not necessarily themselves suicidal. There are people out there who are writing school essays or reports that cover the topic, or people who heard about some celebrity suicide and are curious about how others have done it, or people who are writing works of fiction and need some ideas for how a character might kill himself, etc. Wikipedia is here to serve all of these people too and what they need is a high-quality encyclopedia article packed with useful NPOV information about the subject.
You make a good point here. Right now I don't have an answer to it. I just know that a "how-to" article on suicide seems very wrong to me.
I don't know what version of the article you last saw, but the current version http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Suicide_method&oldid=123975812 doesn't look very much like a how-to article to me. There's a lot of information here about the physiological effects of various suicide methods and about their prevalence in various populations. Perhaps you're interpreting the description of physiological effects as a "how-to"? I can see that happening, but I don't see any way to avoid it without losing the descriptive aspect.
And Wikipedia's all about that descriptive aspect, so impasse.
Bryan Derksen schreef: [...]
There's a lot of information here about the physiological effects of various suicide methods...
And a lot of it is not very pleasant, e.g. "There are many cases of brain damage and severe physical trauma that do not result in loss of life."
Personally, I consider some of these outcomes to be worse than a clean painless suicide, and I wouldn't be surprised if many suicidal peoply would agree. It could well be that reading this, they could decide to pick another, less riskier method, or perhaps to not commit suicide after all. These are both positive effects that the page could have.
I agree with Bryan that the page does not read as a how-to, and I'm not certain at all how large the negative effect of the page is, and if it outweighs the positive side mentioned above.
Eugene
On 4/20/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
You make a good point here. Right now I don't have an answer to it. I just know that a "how-to" article on suicide seems very wrong to me.
How-to articles are wrong, plain and simple. We even have a template for it.
Steve