[WikiEN-l] Rorschach wars continue

[Sage Ross]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Ken Arromdee<arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, FastLizard4 wrote:
>> The concern is legitimate, if for no other reason than Wikipedia is
>> usually in the top ranks of any Google search.  But, Wikipedia is one
>> site out of God-knows-how-many on the Internet, and /someone/ has to
>> take the top search ranking on Google.  If it just so happens that that
>> top ranked page has the same information as the Wikipedia article, it's
>> the same problem, the only difference being that the problem is not
>> Wikipedia's.
>
> The same argument can be made about any issue which just involves privacy and
> not even danger to lives.  If you search for Brian Peppers on the Internet,
> you can still find all the information you want; that's not an excuse for
> Wikipedia to have the article.
>
> Someone else who is thinking of putting the information up can easily think
> "even if I didn't put it up, Wikipedia would have the top search ranking".
> You end up with everyone passing the responsibility to everyone else to stop it
> first.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility
>

This is very different from Brian Peppers.  The rich body of research
on these tests (too much for anyone to easily digest) actually points
to the need for a Wikipedia-style summary of the relevant data.  It's
one thing to say that the general public shouldn't be exposed to that
data arbitrarily; it's quite another to say that it should be kept
from people who are searching for it (which is how people end up
reading the Wikipedia article on it).

One can think of many classes of information where plausible arguments
could be made that society would be better of if such-and-such were
not widely known.  In this case, the argument would be that
psychologist (and interested non-patients/non-test-subjects?) should
have access to the accumulated data about these tests but those who
may be subjected to the tests should not.  Maybe that would be good
for society, maybe not.  But that clashes with core Wikimedia values
in ways that tabloid topics of borderline notability do not.

There is no question that the information about the tests is important
and valuable knowledge (whether the tests themselves are clinically
useful is another matter).  In contrast to Brian Peppers, here the
argument is that the info should be removed *because* it's important
and valuable.  So we're being asked to impoverish the commons for the
sake of protecting the gatekeeping privileges of professional
psychologists, at the expense of interested non-psychologists.

-Sage