[WikiEN-l] Docs look to Wikipedia for condition info: Manhattan Research

[Fred Bauder]

> On Tue, 26 May 2009, Fred Bauder wrote:
>> You're preaching to the choir. Often when we want to do the right
>> thing,
>> we are confronted with a demand for a rule, or presented with one,
>> typically "no censorship". There is no substitute for doing what is
>> appropriate in the circumstances. Trying to codify that principle is
>> futile, although Ignore all rules comes close.
>
> IAR is particularly subject to wikilawyering in this situation.  It says
> that
> it applies when a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining
> Wikipedia.
> This can be easily interpreted to mean that any use of IAR must improve
> Wikipedia itself, and that considerations outside Wikipedia (such as BLP
> and other issues related to avoiding harm) are ineligible for IAR.
>

Trying to do Biographies of living persons without a rule proved futile;
so a written policy was created. We still don't have a corresponding
policy for organizations. The underlying principle is don't hang an
article on scraps of negative information, but you could write a book on
the biographies on Wikipedia, and an even more interesting book if you
collected all the half-cocked material we have excluded for one reason or
another. Not a book you would want to publish or distribute in the UK,
however.

Fred Bauder