On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Delirium<delir...@hackish.org> wrote: > Durova wrote: >> With respect and appreciation extended toward Apoc2400, it's dubious that >> there would be a need for a separate policy to cover this rare situation. >> At most, a line or two in existing policy would articulate the matter. >> > In practice this is dealt with on a case-by-case basis precisely because > previous attempts to come up with any sort of actual policy have failed. > The last major push was around an attempt to keep detailed information > on the construction of nuclear bombs out of Wikipedia (which failed).
I'm rather curious about this claim, given that I work actively on the topic of the construction of nuclear bombs, and the articles on-wiki about it. What's in Wikipedia is significantly less detailed than is found in other references, both online and in books and other references, regarding actual design details and the theory and engineering thereof. Under what is now codified as WPNOTHOWTO we provide enough descriptive syntax to let people know what technologies and methods are used generally, and provide links off to the appropriate books/websites for more details if one wants to go figure out the math and engineering details. Even those more detailed open sources don't provide actual easy design instructions (other than for Little Boy, the first gun-type nuclear bomb); critical details on exact lens shapes (and for more modern weapons, lens geometry and operating concepts) have not been published at this time by the non-governmental research community. There is a tendency among many people to believe that any detailed discussion about nuclear weapon operating principles is a security risk of some sort. Some of the people who believe that include many nonproliferation experts. But this is an attempt at security by obscurity - the information has been unclassified and available to researchers and the public for decades. The only people fooled by thinking "This is very hard and we have to keep it all as hush-hush as possible" are the general public, and many public policy discussions are badly flawed as a result. There is no issue here. If you're afraid of this you don't know enough about the state of the non-governmental non-classified body of knowledge on the subject. I would be happy to explain more in detail offline, as this is pretty tangental to the list here and the topic at hand, but it's really not something Wikipedia needs to worry about. -- -george william herbert george.herb...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
