[WikiEN-l] Fwd: The counterattack of the PR companies

[Charles Matthews]

On 19 April 2012 16:01, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I liked Andreas's way of putting this earlier:
>
> > Positive bias and advertorials *can* be odious, but activist editing with a
> > negative bent has traditionally been the greater problem in Wikipedia, in
> > my view, and is the type of bias the Wikipedia system has traditionally
> > favoured. Not doing harm is, in my view, more important than preventing
> > the opposite.
>
[[Primum non nocere]] is worth reading, but of course it is about
medicine, and is only an aspiration, and does not mean physicians have
to treat conservatively. It means they have justify medical
intervention.

Assuming that "do no harm" in the sense of journalism is supposed to
be applied to WP, it does fall under WP:NOT to some extent.
"Indiscriminate information" ought to be a reason to delete. We do
have to justify intervening in people's lives by hosting an article
about them. On the other hand, we very often can give that
justification. It doesn't have to be in the terms an investigative
journalist would use.

Charles