On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 21:56, Ken Arromdee <arrom...@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. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
