On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > On 19 April 2012 16:01, Samuel Klein <meta...@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]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
