Daniel Mayer wrote:
If Wikipedia becomes a place where information is censored, then I think a lot of contributors will leave.
We censor the encyclopedia fairly heavily.
Have you ever been on RC patrol? Have you ever tried to bring an article from a POV essay to an NPOV article? I have. And when I do, I delete and revert utter crap at a high rate. For subpar content, I censor out the crap and salvage the good parts.
Editorial standards are very much so a form of censorship. The reason why this is a good thing, is because Wikipedia is not a social club.
I agree totally with the sentiment, but not with the terminology. Let me explain why.
If what we do when we carefully write a great article is *censorship* then we've blurred the use of a very good word which should be reserved for cases where someone is using *force* to prevent other people from speaking freely.
If we're censors, then how can we criticize governments who block wikipedia?
It's just a terminological thing, but I totally totally agree with mav otherwise.
I would have worded it this way: editorial judgment is *not* censorship. We can't let our passions against censorship (which are valid, given our mission) lead us to keep crap in the encyclopedia only because it's offensive.
If an image as badly made as this one was posted on a totally innocuous topic, I think it would have been deleted long ago, just for being awful. It's ironically only that we are so afraid of being accused of censorship that we let it go on this long, I think.
(And many have said this to me about this one: is it a bad precedent to delete it? It's a bad precedent if by doing so we are saying that we can't have images that offend anyone. It's not a bad precedent if we say: This image is as awful as a misspelled word.)
--Jimbo