On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Charles Matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
On 19 April 2012 16:01, Samuel Klein
<meta.sj(a)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]]