[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as moral tool?

[William Pietri]

My understanding of what Wikipedia does at the core has always been 
pretty simple: We take factual material elsewhere and summarize it 
neutrally and clearly. I feel like the service we provide to readers is 
pretty simple: instead of making them dig through all the stuff out 
there on some topic just to get an overview, we do the first pass at 
that for them.

But lately I hear a different thing. Now that we've become so prominent, 
I hear people saying that we should be using Wikipedia as a moral 
instrument.

If we don't like how sites treat our editors, we should disappear them. 
If we don't like that the media reports certain things, we should prune 
that information. It doesn't matter if it was in multiple reliable 
sources: if we don't trust our readers with the facts, we should cut 
them out.

What worries me about this isn't so much the current uses, although they 
bother me a little. Instead, I worry about two things:

   1. Once we cross the line away from "just the NPOV facts, ma'am" to
      Wikipedia-as-moral-tool, will it really be limited to these two
      things? Won't people find more ways to improve the world by
      restricting what we print?
   2. Don't we risk eternal contention? It seems like getting people to
      agree on the facts is hard enough. Can we ever come up with a
      shared morality?


That's not to say that we shouldn't suppress facts for moral purposes. 
There are good arguments for it. I'm just wondering what the long-term 
cost is.

William