Wikipedia Debates Rorschach Censorship

GigsVT writes "Editors on Wikipedia are engaged in an epic battle over a few piece of paper smeared with ink. The 10 inkblot images that form the classic Rorschach test have fallen into the public domain, and so including them on Wikipedia would seem to be a simple choice. However, some editors have cited the American Psychological Association's statement that exposure of the images to the public is an unethical act, since prior exposure to the images could render them ineffective as a psychological test. Is the censorship of material appropriate, when the public exposure to that material may render it useless?"

Comments

Re:I thought they..

[xant]

On the contrary, in order to interpret the results scientifically, you have to have already used them and determined a basis for scoring. How this is classically done with the original Rorschach is a series of markings based on the contents of the respondent's answer. They also score things like whether you pick the card up, whether you turn it around, whether you give more than one answer, etc. Without a fixed means of scoring the blots, you don't have data, you just have hand-waving.

But there are other tests out there, with their own means of scoring. Some of them even try to generate random inputs.

Re:Here they are.

[mwvdlee]

Those are the outlines of the inkblots. Those have been public for quite some time now but psychologists believed they had no significant influence on the reliability of the actual test (which, I guess, means the outlines didn't make the tests less unreliable). The wikipedia images are the actual colored blobs and DO have the desired effect of making a useless test unusable.

Re:Progress of society

[Anonymous Coward]

Try going to a Penn & Teller show and telling everyone how each trick is done.

Why bother? Penn& Teller already do that as part of their act.

Listening to Tom Cruise a bit too much?

[spun]

Psychologists used other means to diagnose people, then gave them the Rorschach test. They found correlations between certain diagnoses and certain types of answers or behaviors exhibited during the test. The Rorschach test is not a definitive test that will tell you unequivocally what specific mental issues you have. Like all psychological tests, it is just one tool among many that helps a trained expert make a diagnosis. For instance, if the Rorschach test says you are a psychopath, but you show a capacity for empathy and remorse, any trained psychologist will know that the test simply didn't work on you.