My understanding of what Wikipedia does at the core has always been pretty simple: We take factual material elsewhere and summarize it neutrally and clearly. I feel like the service we provide to readers is pretty simple: instead of making them dig through all the stuff out there on some topic just to get an overview, we do the first pass at that for them. But lately I hear a different thing. Now that we've become so prominent, I hear people saying that we should be using Wikipedia as a moral instrument. If we don't like how sites treat our editors, we should disappear them. If we don't like that the media reports certain things, we should prune that information. It doesn't matter if it was in multiple reliable sources: if we don't trust our readers with the facts, we should cut them out. What worries me about this isn't so much the current uses, although they bother me a little. Instead, I worry about two things: 1. Once we cross the line away from "just the NPOV facts, ma'am" to Wikipedia-as-moral-tool, will it really be limited to these two things? Won't people find more ways to improve the world by restricting what we print? 2. Don't we risk eternal contention? It seems like getting people to agree on the facts is hard enough. Can we ever come up with a shared morality? That's not to say that we shouldn't suppress facts for moral purposes. There are good arguments for it. I'm just wondering what the long-term cost is. William