[WikiEN-l] Human dignity

[Ray Saintonge]

Gregory Maxwell wrote:

>On 7/14/06, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>On 7/15/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I would vote "delete, nn - human dignity".  A full explanation would be:
>>>For goodness sake, leave the poor woman alone.
>>>      
>>>
>>It's a combination of factors, I think:
>>- Did she actively seek out this publicity, or was it forced on her?
>>- Is there an identifiable "cult" surrounding her persona that goes
>>beyond narrowly limited demographic or subcultural subsets?
>>- Have other publications using reliable processes (not necessarily
>>print) picked up the story for some reason other than reprinting it?
>>Has it ever transcended the "Offbeat News" section?
>>    
>>
>Along these lines:
>Will anyone care in a year? two years? ten years? one hundred years?
>
>Wikipedia is forever. It is a waste of the project's time when someone
>writes an article on something which will be forgotten before the
>article matures.
>
This is clearly a wrong criterion.  It should not be our role to judge 
what will or won't be forgotten, or what should or shouldn't be 
forgotten.  It may be safe to say that many people whose names were 
included in the earlier editions Britannica were edited out in 
subsequent editions.  We can at least argue that Wiki is not paper.  
Politicians are always doing and saying things that they hope will be 
forgotten, and persons with vested interests are often happy with that 
state of things.

There is no waste of the project's time here, though the individual 
editor may have been wasting his own time.  There is a need to avoid 
this tendency to view Wikipedia as something more than what it is.  We 
are not professionals, so why should we be pretending that we are 
producing a professional product?  Let's quit basing policy simply on 
what the neighbours think.

Human dignity is an entirely different criterion that could be viewed as 
a derivative of Wikilove.

>Our behavior should be guided both by ethics and by a practical
>dedication to the goals of our project (*Free Content*,
>*Encyclopedia*). Articles which represent a breach of ethics should be
>deleted just the same as topics which are unencyclopedic.
>
The ethical principle is much more sound but let's not confuse it with 
"unencyclopedic".  Sometimes who is involved is far less important than 
the incident itself, and in this case that may be adequate reason for 
omitting the name of the person.  For those who really feel that it is 
something important to know they have ample opportunity to track down 
the source.

Laying down a set of rules and calling them ethics is not what ethics 
are all about, although rules can still be derived from ethical 
principles.  I would not think it appropriate for our principles of 
human dignity to be guided and defined by what happened with this one 
woman.  That would be too shallow.  The real issue is deeper than that.  
It could be too that this is an even more important issue for Wikinews.

Some have criticized AP for spreading this story.  They have done it 
this way forever.  Of course habit is not a justification.  They mention 
names because by failing to do say they risk perpetrating urban myth.  
Incidents of this sort can easily grow into such proportions.  Urban 
myth can best be controlled by having all the facts available, 
verifiable and open.  Newspapers could print the names; radio and TV 
stations could report them, and those names would soon be forgotten.  
When we review old newspapers or other publications it is often with the 
active intent of developing some particular story as opposed to the more 
passive intent of repeating whatever random information we happen to 
find.  Will people actively search for these oddball incidents in the 
wiki database ten years from now when it will be so much bigger?  Or 
will they be pleased to just discover it as a random article?

Ec