[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia article on [[Santorum (neologism)]]

[Tom Morris]

On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 21:56, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:
> The reason: Wikipedia is on the Internet.  If Wikipedia has an article
> about something whose promoter specifically intends to spread it on the
> Internet, it is impossible to separate reporting from participation.  It's
> a loophole in the definition of neutrality that doing things which help
> one side of a dispute doesn't break neutrality, simply because our
> intentions are neutral--even though our effects are not.
>

(Warning: POV ahead.)

Using that logic, we should probably shut down every page on WP about
politics, religion, alternative medicine and anything even vaguely
controversial. There are factions within those movements or groups who
stand to benefit from people knowing less rather than more about them.
The Church of Scientology would probably object on the same lines as
you have that the mere existence of the article "Xenu" can never be
neutral because they would rather there not be an article at all. Our
effect is to make Scientology seem more ridiculous to outsiders.

Similarly, there are probably Pentecostalist movements who would
rather people not read the sections of the article on "Glossolalia"
about how linguists and neuroscientists have studied people speaking
in tongues and found that they aren't actually speaking a language
with any actual semantic structure but rather a "meaningless but
phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to
be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any
natural language, living or dead". By including this material, we are
in effect biased against movements who would rather people knew less
about the scientific underpinnings (or rather lack thereof) of an
impressive-looking religious practice.

A great many people when asked their views on homeopathy think it is
basically a form of herbal medicine. There are undoubtedly homeopaths
who financially benefit from this confusion and are quite happy that
people associate their extremely dubious pseudoscience with herbal
medicine, which is basically a ragtag bag of stuff that does and does
not work (the stuff that does work often becomes known simply as
'medicine').

In general, there are a lot of fields where people use and benefit
from other people's ignorance.

Neutrality isn't an excuse for ensuring inconvenient material doesn't
turn up on Google search results because it might be biased.

A reductio ad absurdum: imagine there is a voter who intends to vote
purely based on some very arbitrary property of a political candidate
like, say, the colour of their suit. Most informed people would say
that this is a poor use of one's vote and one is not living up to
one's moral duties to make an informed and meaningful decision about
policy with one's vote. In order to enforce this kind of
outcomes-based neutrality, should we remove all photographs of
candidates on Wikipedia in the run up to elections in order to
encourage people to vote based on policy rather than appearance. And
what if there is a candidate who is specifically trying to benefit
from being aesthetically pleasing? Should we make his picture bigger
to ensure the race is fair?

Determining neutrality on the basis of outcome could have such
perverse consequences for article policy that it really seems like a
tough row to hoe.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>

Please don't print this e-mail out unless you want a hard copy of
it. If you do, go ahead. I won't stop you. Nor will I waste your
ink/toner with 300+ lines of completely pointless and legally
unenforceable cargo cult blather about corporate confidentiality.