There’s a fascinating article from the New York Times today about how the Wikipedia article on the Rorsach Test now features the ten original ink blots used by Hermann Rorshach, how published his work in 1921, and common responses to go with them. People in psychiatric professions are worried about this because it provides patients with a cheat sheet into how their test works: if someone doesn’t want his doctor to know how his mind works from the test, he can now go to Wikipedia and look up potential answers to obfuscate his own mental status. The danger here is not only to the patient, who psychiatrists would be unable to treat, but to society on the whole, as that patient could have compulsions to do harm.
You might be asking yourself “Why go after Wikipedia? Aren’t the materials online in some other form?” Probably yes. In fact, I’m all but certain that if you browse deep enough into message boards and the like, you’ll find that this information has been online for years. But the point of concern is that the material’s presence on Wikipedia allows for a pretty surefire method for those looking to cheat on their Rorshach test to find what they’re looking for. It’s the same reasoning that rightholders employ when targeting file sharing services: go after the big guys who are (arguably) harming you the most.
So what should Wikipedia do? I honestly don’t know. On the one hand, information should be accessible. How 1984 would it be to have a class of knowledge that you could only know if you met certain criteria? At the same time, if having something online can do harm, one could argue that we have a moral imperative to remove it. Wikipedia even believes this philosophy in some cases – recently, it removed edits to an article about a New York Times employee who had been kidnapped in order to not increase the man’s perceived value in the eyes of his captors. If you were Wikipedia, what would you do?
