[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia as moral tool?

[William Pietri]

Hi, Fred. Just to make clear in advance, I'm neither agreeing nor 
disagreeing with your positions. I'm more interested in the form of the 
argument than the content. Also, I apologize for picking out your 
sentences in particular; it's nothing personal, and I'm just using them 
as examples of a broader pattern.

Fred Bauder wrote:
> People have a right to live without a spotlight turned on them. [...]
>   


Since people have taken issue with the term "morals", let's see if 
changing the approach can help, to looking at "values".

Above, the first bit is valuing privacy. Elsewhere somebody talked about 
a right to privacy. This is not a universal position. It varies a fair 
bit across cultures. In [[The Transparent Society]], Brin argued that 
historically it's a relatively new thing, coming with urbanization and 
increased wealth that gives increased space and increased mobility. He 
argued further that it's a temporary thing, that cheap surveillance 
means ubiquitous surveillance. He suggests that privacy is doomed, and 
the choice available now is about what kind of society we want to build 
around that.

Now before that triggers 100 replies defending or exploring privacy, let 
me plead: don't discuss that now. I already know a lot of people here 
value privacy. My point here is that this is a value that some hold 
strongly and some not at all. So please: if you can't contain yourself 
from talking about privacy right this instant, don't to it in this thread.

A related value that crops up a lot here is that of accepting 
pseudonymity. And in fact we go beyond accepting it. A big part of the 
motivation for the attack sites policy is to prevent diffusion of 
information about leaky pseudonyms. Although in this case it's not cast 
as a universal value, in that we don't defend pseudonyms like "Deep 
Throat", just ones used on our site.

> The question is whether dissemination of the information is useful or harmful.
>   

That sounds pretty neutral (although "useful" is a value that many in 
the world would not put at the top), I think deciding what's harmful is 
inevitably going to come back to personal choices about values. There 
are a lot of people who believe information on sex should be suppressed. 
They believe that information is harmful. But still, we have articles 
like [[Cock ring]] and [[Ball gag]]. Is this a question that can be 
settled via referring to facts? Or do they just value different things 
than we do?


Now let me be clear: I'm not saying we should try to run this place 
somehow without having any shared sense of values. I'm not sure it's 
possible, and I surely don't want to try. My concern here is the 
potential for becoming something different than a neutral provider of 
factual information, becoming other than the distillation of what 
responsible people have studied responsibly.

I feel like both some recent BLP activity and the proposed "attack 
sites" policy take us away from NPOV. They actively suppress factual 
information that people can get elsewhere to impose our values on our 
readers. Is modern society not sensitive enough to privacy concerns? 
Well, we'll cut out names that appear in CNN and on the AP newswire. 
Does someone not agree that the Internet's most popular information 
source should be run by people who keep their identities secret? 
Suppress mention of them.

I'm not saying that these choices are right or wrong. What I'm saying 
that I'm worried about us becoming comfortable with arguments of the 
form of "We disapprove of X so we shouldn't give our readers the facts, 
even if they can look it up on a hundred other sites."

First, I don't see why it would stop with just the current cases. And 
second, I think it will inevitably have one of two bad effects on the 
community: either unending argument over which values to impose, or the 
loss of editors who don't share the particular set of imposed values in 
vogue at the moment.


William