Marc Riddell wrote:
on 4/19/07 6:51 PM, Jason McCabe Calacanis at jason@calacanis.com wrote:
People searching for this subject material are going to be, in many/most cases, in need of help.
Perhaps there is an opportunity here to leave the page without the methods and post a note that community doesn't feel comfortble posting such material and then linking to various support services.
Sort of a honey trap to help people in need... Thinking outside the box here.
Best j
Jason,
Excellent insight; and excellent, excellent idea!
I'd have no problem with including a few links to support services somewhere in the article, but this is not really Wikipedia's responsibility and the information content of the page shouldn't suffer as a result. Should web sites dedicated to depressing poetry or handguns also blank their content and replace it with suicide prevention counselling?
Bear in mind that a good many people who consult this article are not necessarily themselves suicidal. There are people out there who are writing school essays or reports that cover the topic, or people who heard about some celebrity suicide and are curious about how others have done it, or people who are writing works of fiction and need some ideas for how a character might kill himself, etc. Wikipedia is here to serve all of these people too and what they need is a high-quality encyclopedia article packed with useful NPOV information about the subject.