Fred Bauder wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Delirium [mailto:delirium@hackish.org]
Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2007 06:16 PM
To: 'English Wikipedia'
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as moral tool?
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
We follow a reasonable standard that we arrive at though the same process we arrive at
any policy, discussion leading to consensus.
Fred
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Which presupposes that such a discussion is -allowed to take place-, and
does not have a predetermined outcome before it even begins. I agree
myself we shouldn't be publishing home addresses or phone numbers. But
in addition to being potentially unethical, it's unencyclopedic anyway.
There's no tension there at all, there's no reason we -should- do that.
Not so clear-cut, with the recent BLP stuff. Is QZ encyclopedic? I think
so, it's a reliably-sourced look at how emergent Internet phenomena
started up and took place. Is Allison Stokke encyclopedic? Well...I'm a
little more on the fence on that one, but again, it was studied by at
least the Washington Post, and apparently several other sources, as an
example of the same type of phenomenon. We certainly wouldn't exclude
reliable studies of the causes behind the LA riots or World War I, and I
think both of those articles did go beyond mere titillation and a good
case could be made that they did indeed have an encyclopedic purpose. It
wasn't just "Brian PEPAZ lololol" at all.
Now, with QZ, the article should be titled by the name of the meme, not
by his name, but his name should be a redirect. With Allison Stokke, I
imagine a different title could be come up with as well, or it could
even go into a larger article regarding the subject in general of people
who have received unwanted publicity due to becoming an Internet meme.
Again, though, the name should be a redirect.
I agree we shouldn't generally have "biographies" of people which are
really only a description of a small part of their lives. An article
about an event should be titled with the name of the event, we don't
need a separate pseudo-biography on every participant in it. On the
other hand, there quite often does get to be enough information on
people to write a genuine biography, even if they became notable by
chance or circumstances outside their control. (See the Richard Jewell
article, for an example.)
Sometimes, being a comprehensive encyclopedia will mean reporting on
things people will find upsetting, disturbing, shocking, distasteful, or
offensive. Now, we shouldn't -actively seek- to report such things when
they're not genuinely encyclopedic. As Jimbo said, we're not a tabloid.
But we also shouldn't hesitate to report them when they really are an
encyclopedic and appropriate subject. A lot of people, including me,
would certainly find child porn, lolicon, racism, neo-Nazism, and many
such things disgusting and distasteful. But we certainly should still
have articles on them. I find what happened to Allison Stokke to be
pretty disgusting, but a pretty good case can be made that we should
have an article on it. "Sensitivity", especially since it sounds so
nice, is a very easy thing to take way, way too far. NPOV is sometimes
going to mean being insensitive. And when the two clash, NPOV should win.
(As a side note, when I'm on the -inclusionist- side of something,
something is very likely wrong...)