[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as moral tool?

[Fred Bauder]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: William Pietri [mailto:william at scissor.com]
>Sent: Tuesday, June 5, 2007 07:19 AM
>To: 'English Wikipedia'
>Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as moral tool?
>
>
>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. 

We have always included material which is not factual in the slightest. If a subject attracts human attention, it is considered worth of inclusion.

>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.

We have a duty to act responsibly. Although we are a corporation, we are not necessarily nihilistic.

>If we don't like how sites treat our editors, we should disappear them.

Sites which cause serious harm to our users may incur such a penalty.

>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.

Media reports which abuse the privacy of other persons, even those in the Washington Post, need not be repeated on Wikipedia as though we were mindless, nihilistic robots.

>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?

We must work to strike a moral balance between to good of knowledge being available and the possible evil of harming others.

> 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?

We can move toward it, learning from experience and observing the results of our actions.

>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.

There are two costs, the costs of doing nothing and the costs of attempting to be responsible, both are substantial.

>William

Responses by Fred