On 6/5/07, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/5/07, Fred Bauder fredbaud@waterwiki.info wrote:
We must work to strike a moral balance between to good of knowledge
being available and the possible evil of harming others.
It is impossible to know which bits of information cause damage it is impossible to quantify the damage and again impossible to quantify the good.
The field of science has been dealing with this problem for some time. The position of arguing that information is neither intrinsically good nor evil appears to be the only sustainable option.
I have to say I completely disagree with that. Maybe these things can't be quantified numerically, but I don't think we'll ever live in a society which can handle giving all information to all people. I forget who it was that said it, but someone in here mentioned that Wikipedia is fortunate to be constrained by certain external forces (mostly laws) which discourage us from truly printing every fact known to man. I'll add that Wikipedia's policy against original research and in favor of using reliable sources saves us from considering a lot more bad ideas. I'd hate to see some of the arguments that would go on without these constraints.