[WikiEN-l] The terrorists have won

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 9:06 AM, Ken Arromdee<arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, stevertigo wrote:
>> > More generally, my point is that the reasoning offered for the
>> > censorship is intellectually bankrupt.
>>
>> Well let's not attribute to malice what better can be ascribed to
>> corporate do-gooderness. Obviously, if the NYT, in presenting
>> themselves to media, represented their case as being a tactic rather
>> than simply a gesture of compliance, then they now have a little issue
>> of journalistic integrity with everyone they dealt with.
>
> That gets back to something I notied a while earlier:
>
> Letting the newspaper decide that the harm done by suppressing information is
> less than the benefit of helping the prisoner survive, when the prisoner is
> a newspaper reporter, *is a conflict of interest*.  We can't rely on the New
> York Times to make an unbiased, fairly presented, argument for weighing the
> two options when they're trying to protect one of their own reporters.
>
> It's not just the Times' fault for not having the journalistic integrity
> to describe the situation accurately, it's ours for trusting them.  We
> *shouldn't* trust someone with a conflict of interest.  The fact that we
> did so shows that we don't have a good enough grasp on what it means to
> have a conflict of interest.


Some things are not easily describable and modelable in the in-wiki
mental model and process.

We do badly enough on breaking news without introducing "our coverage
may put a life at risk" as an additional complication.

We are not currently prepared to be entirely community-wide
consensusly responsible and ethical and consistent about some news
stories which are actively evolving.  We're not supposed to be doing
that anyways.  We're an encyclopedia (WP, at least), not a news
source.  We do other things badly.  Applying our "build an
encyclopedia" logic, ethics, structure, consensus to other types of
information may work particularly badly.


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