[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia:News suppression (was: News agencies are not RSs)

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Delirium<delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> Durova wrote:
>> With respect and appreciation extended toward Apoc2400, it's dubious that
>> there would be a need for a separate policy to cover this rare situation.
>> At most, a line or two in existing policy would articulate the matter.
>>
> In practice this is dealt with on a case-by-case basis precisely because
> previous attempts to come up with any sort of actual policy have failed.
> The last major push was around an attempt to keep detailed information
> on the construction of nuclear bombs out of Wikipedia (which failed).

I'm rather curious about this claim, given that I work actively on the
topic of the construction of nuclear bombs, and the articles on-wiki
about it.

What's in Wikipedia is significantly less detailed than is found in
other references, both online and in books and other references,
regarding actual design details and the theory and engineering
thereof.

Under what is now codified as WPNOTHOWTO we provide enough descriptive
syntax to let people know what technologies and methods are used
generally, and provide links off to the appropriate books/websites for
more details if one wants to go figure out the math and engineering
details.

Even those more detailed open sources don't provide actual easy design
instructions (other than for Little Boy, the first gun-type nuclear
bomb); critical details on exact lens shapes (and for more modern
weapons, lens geometry and operating concepts) have not been published
at this time by the non-governmental research community.


There is a tendency among many people to believe that any detailed
discussion about nuclear weapon operating principles is a security
risk of some sort.  Some of the people who believe that include many
nonproliferation experts.  But this is an attempt at security by
obscurity - the information has been unclassified and available to
researchers and the public for decades.  The only people fooled by
thinking "This is very hard and we have to keep it all as hush-hush as
possible" are the general public, and many public policy discussions
are badly flawed as a result.

There is no issue here.  If you're afraid of this you don't know
enough about the state of the non-governmental non-classified body of
knowledge on the subject.  I would be happy to explain more in detail
offline, as this is pretty tangental to the list here and the topic at
hand, but it's really not something Wikipedia needs to worry about.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com