-----Original Message----- From: geni [mailto:geniice@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2007 04:28 PM To: 'English Wikipedia' Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as moral tool?
On 6/5/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
We must work to strike a moral balance between to good of knowledge being available and the possible evil of harming others.
It is impossible to know which bits of information cause damage it is impossible to quantify the damage and again impossible to quantify the good.
It's not at all impossible. Detailed information about private people is harmful. Even excessively detailed information about public figures. publishing private phone numbers of celebrities is an obvious pain in the ass. We don't need to know if George Bush has Herpes. People have a right to live without a spotlight turned on them. Likewise detailed information about how to kill people is rather obviously harmful. None of the statements you made are true. Rough approximations may be arrived at with respect to all 3.
The field of science has been dealing with this problem for some time. The position of arguing that information is neither intrinsically good nor evil appears to be the only sustainable option.
The question is whether dissemination of the information is useful or harmful.
-- geni
Responses by Fred
On 6/6/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
It's not at all impossible. Detailed information about private people is harmful. Even >excessively detailed information about public figures. publishing private phone numbers of >celebrities is an obvious pain in the ass.
Such information is not encyclopedic.
We don't need to know if George Bush has Herpes.
Until it becomes a political issue.
People have a right to live without a spotlight turned on them.
Not under US law.
Likewise detailed information about how to kill people is rather obviously harmful.
And yet there don't appear to be any shortage of self defence classes or shooting galleries.
None of the statements you made are true. Rough approximations may be arrived at with >respect to all 3.
Going by your above examples this would not appear to be the case. Detailed information about how to kill can be used for good or ill.
The question is whether dissemination of the information is useful or harmful.
"useful or harmful" is even worse since it fails to define who it is useful for.
Fred Bauder wrote:
It is impossible to know which bits of information cause damage it is impossible to quantify the damage and again impossible to quantify the good.
It's not at all impossible. Detailed information about private people is harmful. Even excessively detailed information about public figures. publishing private phone numbers of celebrities is an obvious pain in the ass. We don't need to know if George Bush has Herpes. People have a right to live without a spotlight turned on them. Likewise detailed information about how to kill people is rather obviously harmful. None of the statements you made are true. Rough approximations may be arrived at with respect to all 3.
The rough approximations vary widely according to cultural norms, though, which poses quite a problem for Wikipedia since we're an international enyclopedia, rather than situated in any one culture. We don't need to know if George Bush has Herpes, perhaps; do we need to know that FDR had polio? The consensus for many years was that this was private information that would be inappropriate to publicize against his wishes. However, more recently, it's been mentioned more widely, and we mention it in our own article. There are probably still people who find that distasteful, but what are we supposed to do about that?
I think that we can probably all agree on the extremes (e.g. home phone numbers), but it gets murky quickly past that. For example, some countries prohibit publishing the names of various categories of alleged criminals, or various categories of alleged victims, whereas other countries' press does so routinely; which standard do we follow?
-Mark
Hi, Fred. Just to make clear in advance, I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with your positions. I'm more interested in the form of the argument than the content. Also, I apologize for picking out your sentences in particular; it's nothing personal, and I'm just using them as examples of a broader pattern.
Fred Bauder wrote:
People have a right to live without a spotlight turned on them. [...]
Since people have taken issue with the term "morals", let's see if changing the approach can help, to looking at "values".
Above, the first bit is valuing privacy. Elsewhere somebody talked about a right to privacy. This is not a universal position. It varies a fair bit across cultures. In [[The Transparent Society]], Brin argued that historically it's a relatively new thing, coming with urbanization and increased wealth that gives increased space and increased mobility. He argued further that it's a temporary thing, that cheap surveillance means ubiquitous surveillance. He suggests that privacy is doomed, and the choice available now is about what kind of society we want to build around that.
Now before that triggers 100 replies defending or exploring privacy, let me plead: don't discuss that now. I already know a lot of people here value privacy. My point here is that this is a value that some hold strongly and some not at all. So please: if you can't contain yourself from talking about privacy right this instant, don't to it in this thread.
A related value that crops up a lot here is that of accepting pseudonymity. And in fact we go beyond accepting it. A big part of the motivation for the attack sites policy is to prevent diffusion of information about leaky pseudonyms. Although in this case it's not cast as a universal value, in that we don't defend pseudonyms like "Deep Throat", just ones used on our site.
The question is whether dissemination of the information is useful or harmful.
That sounds pretty neutral (although "useful" is a value that many in the world would not put at the top), I think deciding what's harmful is inevitably going to come back to personal choices about values. There are a lot of people who believe information on sex should be suppressed. They believe that information is harmful. But still, we have articles like [[Cock ring]] and [[Ball gag]]. Is this a question that can be settled via referring to facts? Or do they just value different things than we do?
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."
First, I don't see why it would stop with just the current cases. And second, I think it will inevitably have one of two bad effects on the community: either unending argument over which values to impose, or the loss of editors who don't share the particular set of imposed values in vogue at the moment.
William
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