Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Community consent?/reply (5)

I appreciate the well-constructed and thoughtful answer, but I don't think that your response answers my question. My question was this: "Do you believe that it is possible for normal, non-programmer people to give informed consent to try out unfinished software that they have no experience with, no knowledge of, and no true ability to judge whether it meets their needs?"

The question you seem to have answered was, "Do you believe people are capable of trying out unfinished software?" The question I actually asked was more like, "Do you believe that it's possible to give en:informed consent to try out unfinished software, given these serious limitations, i.e., that your allegedly informed consent is not what most people would call 'informed' about the subject matter?"

There are well-respected ethicists on both sides of this question, so I can't claim that there is a "right" answer and a "wrong" one. However, I'd like to know your answer.

It may be easier to understand with an example. Consider this case:

The user is an average 20-year-old. He has no experience with software stuff except everyday normal-user things, like sending e-mail and listening to music. Being an approximately median active Wikipedia editor, he makes about five or ten edits a month, most of them trivial changes like typos or adding the name of the latest album released by a band he likes. He receives a message on his talk page from someone he doesn't know, who says, "Hey, go to Special:Preferences and try the new experimental Thing! I really like Thing, and I hope you choose to test it, too!"

At this point in time, given the information he has, is this user capable of giving informed consent to use Thing? Also, is this user capable of giving informed consent to refuse to use Thing?