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

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Historically this is inaccurate, as the article states, the original
phrasing was to "abstain from doing harm", which is significantly
different insofar as it implies a willed action. This didn't at all
refer to medical treatement, but to the common practise of the
time for people who healed to have a sideline in selling poisons
for people who were willing to pay for them.

-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]