 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia includes potentially harmful information in order to be comprehensive, despite some ethical, moral, and legal objections. |
Wikipedia is, first and foremost, an encyclopedia, and as such, its primary goal is to be a fully comprehensive and informative reference work; that is, it does not purposefully omit (i.e. suppress or censor) non-trivial, verifiable, encyclopedically formatted information on notable subjects.
In the pursuit of completeness, Wikipedia includes truthful (sometimes "sensitive") information which can be considered as having possible uses which could be considered, illegal, immoral, unethical, or potentially harmful. Wikipedia's place is to merely provide useful information; what people do with that information is entirely up to them and is either none of Wikipedia's concern or it is believed that the world is better overall for the information being available than if it were not. Wikipedia's ethos is to be informative. Also, trying to predict how people will use a given piece of information can be rather difficult; thus, making decisions based on such predictions in order to "protect" an entity is questionable.
Further, if Wikipedia was to censor on moral/ethical grounds, it would be necessary to choose a particular morality or code of ethics, but this would violate Wikipedia's neutrality; the furthest Wikipedia has gone in this area is WP:BLP, which is rather limited in scope. Just as Neutral Point of View requires a level of factual relativism in not favoring any one view as absolute truth, so is a level of moral relativism required in deciding when to omit content.
Policy proposals to censor on the aforementioned grounds have been made (and rejected) thrice; the seemingly perennial nature of such proposals inspired the writing of this essay.