"Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia)" write
On the other hand, in the realm of BLP, this guideline becomes much more important to keeping content that could damage the well-being and reputation of a living person, while serving no sufficient encyclopedic purpose to warrant doing so, does not sully our project. Wikipedia does not exist to hurt people.
We could try to get untangled here:
- a necessary condition for material to appear in WP is not the same as a sufficient condition.
"Guidelines", to the extent that they contribute to content policy, are primarily not about "keeping". but excluding. That is what a guideline is - why have we forgotten? Outwith the guideline there is reason to ask why the content is there, in that form.
The reason that such confusion is possible goes back to wiki. Wikis are systems of permissions. The default is that people can post material to Wikipedia unless we have said otherwise. But BLP certainly is a big "otherwise". It says we need stringent application of content policy in the cases to which it applies. I certainly agree with that.
"Wikipedia does not exist to hurt people" - true, it exists to write the encyclopedia. There is no general principle of "do no harm" that we recognize, though.
Charles
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2008/10/2 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
"Wikipedia does not exist to hurt people" - true, it exists to write the encyclopedia. There is no general principle of "do no harm" that we recognize, though.
Despite many attempts to put one in as many words into the BLP rules.
- d.
Wasn't there a fatwa on the subject of do no harm at some point? I thought that was an element of the argument to have it included in WP:BLP.
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 9:36 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/2 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
"Wikipedia does not exist to hurt people" - true, it exists to write the
encyclopedia. There is no general principle of "do no harm" that we recognize, though.
Despite many attempts to put one in as many words into the BLP rules.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
2008/10/2 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
Wasn't there a fatwa on the subject of do no harm at some point? I thought that was an element of the argument to have it included in WP:BLP.
It was in there as a "rule of thumb" for a long time. We eventually managed to get it out.
On Oct 2, 2008, at 10:09 AM, geni wrote:
2008/10/2 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com:
Wasn't there a fatwa on the subject of do no harm at some point? I thought that was an element of the argument to have it included in WP:BLP.
It was in there as a "rule of thumb" for a long time. We eventually managed to get it out.
Yeah, because Wikipedia works much better when it can behave more sociopathically.
-Phil
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
Yeah, because Wikipedia works much better when it can behave more sociopathically.
-Phil
We have an article [[Tank Man]]. The Chinese government probably takes the view that it harms their countries stability.
I suspect [[Gary Glitter]] would argue that our article harms him.
Reality is a well known BLP violation.
On Oct 2, 2008, at 10:17 AM, geni wrote:
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
Yeah, because Wikipedia works much better when it can behave more sociopathically.
-Phil
We have an article [[Tank Man]]. The Chinese government probably takes the view that it harms their countries stability.
I suspect [[Gary Glitter]] would argue that our article harms him.
Reality is a well known BLP violation.
In neither of those cases are we *doing* harm. Harm to the people has been done, certainly, but we come late to the party.
As it should be.
-Phil
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
On Oct 2, 2008, at 10:17 AM, geni wrote:
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
Yeah, because Wikipedia works much better when it can behave more sociopathically.
-Phil
We have an article [[Tank Man]]. The Chinese government probably takes the view that it harms their countries stability.
I suspect [[Gary Glitter]] would argue that our article harms him.
Reality is a well known BLP violation.
In neither of those cases are we *doing* harm. Harm to the people has been done, certainly, but we come late to the party.
Err yes we are. You may be hurting the Chinese government right now. You may not have a problem with hurting the Chinese government but that runs into problems with the do no harm approach.
Do no harm is not a useful tool or guide because it can so trivially be shown to be flawed (mostly through cases of where any action causes some harm but also through showing than any action causes hard). Greatest good for the greatest number is slightly more robust but runs into issues with individual liberties.
--- geni
On Oct 2, 2008, at 10:28 AM, geni wrote:
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
On Oct 2, 2008, at 10:17 AM, geni wrote:
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
Yeah, because Wikipedia works much better when it can behave more sociopathically.
-Phil
We have an article [[Tank Man]]. The Chinese government probably takes the view that it harms their countries stability.
I suspect [[Gary Glitter]] would argue that our article harms him.
Reality is a well known BLP violation.
In neither of those cases are we *doing* harm. Harm to the people has been done, certainly, but we come late to the party.
Err yes we are. You may be hurting the Chinese government right now. You may not have a problem with hurting the Chinese government but that runs into problems with the do no harm approach.
Do no harm is not a useful tool or guide because it can so trivially be shown to be flawed (mostly through cases of where any action causes some harm but also through showing than any action causes hard). Greatest good for the greatest number is slightly more robust but runs into issues with individual liberties.
I would suggest that if someone is as committed as you are suggesting to rules lawyering basic ethics, the rule isn't the root problem.
-Phil
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
I would suggest that if someone is as committed as you are suggesting to rules lawyering basic ethics, the rule isn't the root problem.
-Phil
"Do no harm" isn't really part of basic ethics outside wicca. About the only other area would be the Hippocratic Oath and that is losing popularity.
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
I would suggest that if someone is as committed as you are suggesting to rules lawyering basic ethics, the rule isn't the root problem.
-Phil
on 10/2/08 10:50 AM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
"Do no harm" isn't really part of basic ethics outside wicca. About the only other area would be the Hippocratic Oath and that is losing popularity.
geni,
The Oath is losing popularity with whom?
Marc
2008/10/2 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net:
2008/10/2 Philip Sandifer snowspinner@gmail.com:
I would suggest that if someone is as committed as you are suggesting to rules lawyering basic ethics, the rule isn't the root problem.
-Phil
on 10/2/08 10:50 AM, geni at geniice@gmail.com wrote:
"Do no harm" isn't really part of basic ethics outside wicca. About the only other area would be the Hippocratic Oath and that is losing popularity.
geni,
The Oath is losing popularity with whom?
Marc
Some of the evidence based medicine people. Obviously surgeons have always had issues with it.
On Oct 2, 2008, at 10:17 AM, geni wrote:
Do no harm is not a useful tool or guide because it can so trivially be shown to be flawed (mostly through cases of where any action causes some harm but also through showing than any action causes hard). Greatest good for the greatest number is slightly more robust but runs into issues with individual liberties.
To be clear. To "hurt" someone is to cause them pain. In medicine, for one, there can be pain associated with the treatment, and with the healing. To "harm" someone, however, is to cause them unnecessary and irrevocable damage.
Marc Riddell
On 10/2/08, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
To be clear. To "hurt" someone is to cause them pain. In medicine, for one, there can be pain associated with the treatment, and with the healing. To "harm" someone, however, is to cause them unnecessary and irrevocable damage.
[[Iatrogenesis]] is the ten-dollar word for this (of which medacaid will pay a buck-fifty on a good day).
In medical record-keeping jargon, doctor fuck-ups are referred to as an "adverse event", that is, if they are reported at all. Annually (as of 2000) the FDA estimates 44,000 to 98,000 deaths from medical error in the U.S.[1] and the British Medical Journal estimates 1,000,000 injuries[2].
That's right, doctors kill more people than cars, guns, drugs, and STDs.
Of course W's immediate response was "Gee, let's limit the maximum awardable money for medical malpractice suits..." My conclusion is that unless you're about to die anyway, you might be better off not going to a doctor.
Back on topic, while the "do no harm" slogan may have significant merit at face value, I worry that the disturbingly ironic medical undertones make it difficult for the average user to take seriously.
In the end, this nutshell-ism might do us more harm than good.
—C.W.
[1] http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2000/500_err.html [2] http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1117772
On 10/2/08, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
To be clear. To "hurt" someone is to cause them pain. In medicine, for one, there can be pain associated with the treatment, and with the healing. To "harm" someone, however, is to cause them unnecessary and irrevocable damage.
on 10/2/08 2:17 PM, Charlotte Webb at charlottethewebb@gmail.com wrote:
[[Iatrogenesis]] is the ten-dollar word for this (of which medacaid will pay a buck-fifty on a good day).
In medical record-keeping jargon, doctor fuck-ups are referred to as an "adverse event", that is, if they are reported at all. Annually (as of 2000) the FDA estimates 44,000 to 98,000 deaths from medical error in the U.S.[1] and the British Medical Journal estimates 1,000,000 injuries[2].
That's right, doctors kill more people than cars, guns, drugs, and STDs.
Of course W's immediate response was "Gee, let's limit the maximum awardable money for medical malpractice suits..." My conclusion is that unless you're about to die anyway, you might be better off not going to a doctor.
Point well made, CW :-)
Back on topic, while the "do no harm" slogan may have significant merit at face value, I worry that the disturbingly ironic medical undertones make it difficult for the average user to take seriously.
In the end, this nutshell-ism might do us more harm than good.
Then what we really are left with, CW, is the intent of the editor. I agree the term "Do No Harm" is rather vague for our use in the encyclopedia. It does come down to each individual editor asking themselves - honestly - "Why am I including this piece of information?; does it really enrich our understanding of the subject? Or am I just getting-off by including it"?
Marc
There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm." And I believe that in fact, there is. Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that raises the most serious ethical quandaries.
We remain the largest collaborative website in the world, which often produces the top-ranking search result when people look up information on a given individual. I will be dismayed if anyone still believes that the potential harm that our articles may cause to their living subjects by, for example, invading the privacy of borderline-notable living people, is something that should receive no attention in making our content decisions. It would be intolerable for the project to willfully harm innocent people by operating in this manner.
Newyorkbrad
On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 9:36 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
2008/10/2 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
"Wikipedia does not exist to hurt people" - true, it exists to write the
encyclopedia. There is no general principle of "do no harm" that we recognize, though.
Despite many attempts to put one in as many words into the BLP rules.
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
2008/10/2 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkbrad@gmail.com:
There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm." And I believe that in fact, there is. Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that raises the most serious ethical quandaries. We remain the largest collaborative website in the world, which often produces the top-ranking search result when people look up information on a given individual. I will be dismayed if anyone still believes that the potential harm that our articles may cause to their living subjects by, for example, invading the privacy of borderline-notable living people, is something that should receive no attention in making our content decisions. It would be intolerable for the project to willfully harm innocent people by operating in this manner.
Definitely, which is why we have a BLP policy at all - our living bios can profoundly affect the real lives of people in the real world. It's hard to reduce this to mechanistic rules.
- d.
2008/10/2 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkbrad@gmail.com:
There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm." And I believe that in fact, there is. Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that raises the most serious ethical quandaries.
"Do no harm for the sake of doing harm" covers it, I suppose.
But then, that falls under the all-time number-one guideline in this field: "don't be a dick"...
Andrew Gray wrote:
2008/10/2 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkbrad@gmail.com:
There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm." And I believe that in fact, there is. Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that raises the most serious ethical quandaries.
"Do no harm for the sake of doing harm" covers it, I suppose.
But then, that falls under the all-time number-one guideline in this field: "don't be a dick"...
Actually, historically, "don't be such a cunt" trumps that easily. We really don't need to get into measurement contests, nor irritation contests, nor "bon mot" contests.
Really that furthers nothing. And I explicitly include here contests on who can be more aggrieved or insulted by verbiage on the mailing lists. Come on, be adults.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
2008/10/2 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com:
"Do no harm for the sake of doing harm" covers it, I suppose.
But then, that falls under the all-time number-one guideline in this field: "don't be a dick"...
Actually, historically, "don't be such a cunt" trumps that easily. We really don't need to get into measurement contests, nor irritation contests, nor "bon mot" contests.
Really that furthers nothing. And I explicitly include here contests on who can be more aggrieved or insulted by verbiage on the mailing lists. Come on, be adults.
I fear you miss my point, which was not to test anyone's level of irritation - I have been carefully not sending any such posts recently :-) - but to actually make a point about what we're meaning by "do no harm".
Let's recap, hopefully more clearly this time:
"Do no harm" clearly doesn't mean "don't do anything that could be harmful" - the example of writing about a high-profile convict's crime being construed as "harming" them further, for example, is clearly not an approach we want to take!
What it does encompass is *unnecessary* harm - harm we do not have to do but choose to do, such as finding out that the convict in question had a previously obscure bad relationship twenty years ago and quoting the aggrieved ex at length, rather than just not mentioning it and treating it as editorially irrelevant. Insisting on including derogatory material for its own sake and where sober editorial judgement would argue otherwise? That's the kind of thing we're really thinking of, the kind of thing we're worried about.
And, yes, we could invoke "do no harm" here, calling it "do no harm for its own sake" or "do no harm unless it's important" or the like. But my point there was that we, the broad editing community, *already* have a generally accepted approach to this sort of motivated insistence on the content of an article - and, well, we consider it a bad thing. Historically, we looked at those people and said "don't be a dick" rather than "do no harm" - it applied when they wanted to include negative material but it also applied when they wanted to remove it, as well as many other cases.
We may usually phrase it differently, and we may not even conceptualise it as a rule much, but it's still the general view - and when we have a very basic community norm, having an ambiguously worded rule to express a special case of it seems likely to cause more trouble than it solves.
(I am not sure what all this actually makes my view on BLP. I think I endorse the spirit but have no idea how to make a rule workable...)
Andrew Gray wrote:
2008/10/2 Newyorkbrad (Wikipedia) newyorkbrad@gmail.com:
There is, or certainly should be, at a minimum, a policy and spirit of "do no UNNECESSARY or UNJUSTIFIED harm." And I believe that in fact, there is. Of course, it's the question of what is unnecessary or unjustified that raises the most serious ethical quandaries.
"Do no harm for the sake of doing harm" covers it, I suppose.
But then, that falls under the all-time number-one guideline in this field: "don't be a dick"...
It also might as well not be a rule at all, though, because none of the contentious cases of potentially harmful information on living people were added *solely* to harm the person. The problem is when information is potentially harmful, but also potentially useful, especially when people disagree on the degree to which it's either of those.
The most frequent disagreement seems to be tied in with our long-running notability wars, but with the added BLP / potential harm edge. Especially with things to do with popular culture, people simply disagree on to what extent pop-culture phenomena are notable. I happen to take a pretty inclusive view -- several of my academic colleagues study popular culture full-time, including things like internet fads -- but obviously many others don't.
-Mark