On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
> > I
absolutely disagree with that. Like I said, neutrality does not
equal
moral relativism. An encyclopedia *must* decide what
is and isn't
acceptable. There is no choice *except* to decide that.
Why not? What happens if we choose not to decide that?
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice." Seriously,
though, if you don't decide what to include and what not to include, then
you haven't created an encyclopedia, you've created a blob of random bits
of
content.
Oh, sure, we need to decide what is acceptable in terms of notability
and verifiability, that's not the same as deciding what is morally
acceptable which is what we are talking about here.
What are notability and verifiability but decisions of what is morally
acceptable?
Yes, Florida law (although I think UK law is pretty
similar in this
regard). It's not neutral, it's arbitrary, but we have no choice in
the matter.
That's exactly the point I made above, though. You have to choose. Why
choose arbitrarily?
Because we have no choice. You don't choose to obey the law, you have
to do it or you get stopped.
Wikipedia certainly chooses what jurisdiction to base itself in.
What legal content under Florida law isn't
acceptable? And
says who?
The [image of the] beheading of Nick Berg seems to be legal under Florida
law.
But I don't
find it acceptable, and neither do a majority of
Wikipedians. That's
just
one example though. There are an infinite number
of them.
Well, yes, we make an exception for things that don't significantly
add to the article, which that wouldn't. People have a pretty good
idea of what a beheading looks like, so you don't really need to show
them. I guess that is somewhat arbitrary, but there are exceptions to
every rule.
The exact same argument could be made for the Virgin Killer album as for the
Nick Berg beheading image. The image itself was the cause of controversy,
and the controversy could not be completely understood without seeing the
actual image.
Anyway, my point in bringing this up was not to argue about the Nick Berg
image or the VK one. It was to give an example of something I consider
legal but not acceptable, which you requested.
There's
clearly no mens rea on the part of record shop owners at this
point.
Generally (by my understanding) mens rea means you knew what you were
doing, it doesn't require you to know that it was illegal.
There are different levels of mens rea, but such a case would likely fail on
all such levels. I don't think you can prove that a record shop owner even
knew that he was in possession of that album. As for knowledge of the
contents of the album, again, I don't think you can prove that a shop owner
knows the contents of all his albums. And on top of that, I'm not a legal
expert, but I would think there would be some leeway given for the grey-area
nature of this particular album.