Jossi Fresco wrote:
Jimbo's comment about "Most of us do care
passionately about the
ethics of what we are doing, and how it affects people" is worthy of
being featured prominently somewhere in our policy pages.
Ethics, as always, is a complex subject. There are many people that are
potentially affected by Wikipedia. Jimbo correctly points out that the
subjects of biographical articles are among them. However also among
them are readers or potential readers of content. At least some subset
of us participate in Wikipedia out of an ethical concern that
information availability should be levelled. Therefore some of us are
worried that competing ethical concerns that others place higher will
compromise that one that I at least consider primary.
Of course, some concerns are complementary---information is no good if
it's disinformation, and so strongly promoting a culture of citing
sources serves both ends at the same time. Some suggestions that we
leave out "unimportant" but true facts are a little more problematic,
though, and suggestions that we shouldn't be able to have open
discussions during the article-writing process are even more problematic.
-Mark