On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:46:55 +0100, Raphael Wegmann wegmann@psi.co.at wrote:
"Even if admins were blocking a specific POV- so what?" Well, here's why that thinking might be dangerous: most banned editors are banned for disruptively arguing their POV, nor their POV. If we ban accounts on the basis of POVs like already banned editors, that would be a severe error, and compromise our neutrality, our effectiveness, and our ability to criticize ourselves.
There's some truth in this, but I don't see much evidence that people are being actively banned just for holding a POV, only for disruptively asserting it. I guess our tolerance for pedophilia activism and holocaust denial is pretty low, but the average holocaust denier engages in unambiguously banworthy editing (they are usually not too subtle in their biases).
Apart from invoking Godwin's law, I don't think your Reductio ad Nazium argument helps the discussion. No matter how outrageous the POV is, nobody should be banned for merely holding it.
Raphael, you are really starting to cause me to question whether you have the slightest idea what you are talking about. My comment was a serious one founded on a real and present issue with the encyclopaedia.
See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Keltik31
And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Gas_chamber&diff=prev&...
And this: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&pag...
I remember an issue, where the main argument, which was solely based on this non-existent principle (free speech), trumped all explanations, which had been made in pragmatic and specific terms (e.g. onsite bigotry, vote stacking in offsite forums).
No, you remember an example where there was a conflict between a sincerely expressed desire to avoid offence to Muslim editors, with the long-standing that Wikipedia is not censored (in the sense of bowdlerised). We do practice self-censorship - WP:BLP is the most prominent example of this, and one I'd hate to drop - but we do not censor content to accommodate differing religious or cultural mores.
And actually I think you'll find that I was all for linking rather than displaying those images. Not that this is relevant.
Guy (JzG)