[WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

[Fastfission]

Personally, I'd rather it be an either/or choice. I don't want to help
people enforce arbitrary limits on knowledge (if you don't think it is
arbitrary, consider the difference in which a partially-exposed female
breast is considered on American television in comparison to images of
gratuitous violence). I think the principle stands whether it is
pornography or subversive politics, whether the censor is a school
board in Ohio or the Ayatollah.

Practically all great works of knowledge have been at one point
officially banned, including the granddaddy of encyclopedias, the
Encyclopedie. We should expect to be controversial to the point of
being blacklisted by some people, no matter how we try to bend
backwards to accommodate. Let's not start down that path unless we
have to.

FF


On 3/26/06, Philip Welch <wikipedia at philwelch.net> wrote:
> On Mar 26, 2006, at 4:35 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson wrote:
>
> > Look we've been sown this path many times before, and it's never
> > gotten us anywhere, infact, all it's done is make people fight and
> > occasionally force good contributors out because of the hostile mood
> > of the discussion (Wikipedians for decency/encyclopedic merit and
> > WP:TOBY for instance). The fact is, far too many wikipedians think
> > that this kind of censorship is wrong, so you'll NEVER get consensus
> > on it. This is a discussion that should be killed before it has any
> > chance to do more harm.
>
> This has nothing to do with censoring Wikipedia. This is about
> tagging content so schools (for instance) and filtering software used
> by schools can discriminate between Wikipedia articles. Or would you
> rather Wikipedia be inaccessible in schools and libraries?
>
> --
> Philip L. Welch
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Philwelch
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at Wikipedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>