On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 08:52:58 -0500, "Alec Conroy"
<alecmconroy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes. And sometimes, at present, this is then
reverted with "how
> dare you suppress this! censorship!"
What we don't want censored is Wikipedia.
That's the super-precious
thing to cling to. That's the point of the project. That's why this
is special and magical.
But nobody's doing that. Don't make the mistake of thinking that a
link to a hate site is ion some way "content". The content is what
we say about the subject, not the links at the end.
We could remove the hotlink from
www.stormfront.org and it would
have no effect at all on the neutrality of our description of that
site.
Nor does removing the occasional statement in debate that
"stormfront says this, it should be in the article!" materially
affect the neutrality of any other subject. Stormfront is very
obviously not a reliable source.
And let's be clear here, the sites we're talking about are *not
reliable sources* for anything at all - not for critique of
Wikipedia, and definitely not for content.
What's special about Wikipedia is that Wikipedia is
not Censored..
It's breadth is so beyond anything that's ever existed. We have an
article on anything and everything.
This principle has been widely misunderstood, in my view. People
have used it to justify linking to harassment, egregious violations
of WP:BLP, gratuitous images of sexually explicit material. What
WP:NOT censored means is that we do not censor material in order to
avoid offending specific real-world cultural mores. Wikipedia is
not censored for the protection of minors, or to prevent children in
the American deep south for learning that great-great-great-to the
tenth-grandpa was more monkey than Moses. We include the Mohammed
cartoons, the article on penis has a picture of a penis, and we
don't shy form covering controversial content.
But we do self-censor. We do it all the time. WP:BLP is 100%
self-censorship. So is WP:NOR. We don't include any old thing just
because someone wants to, we include it only when it is of direct
benefit to the core aims of producing a verifiable, neutral
encyclopaedia.
And again, links *are not content*.
Guy (JzG)
--
http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG