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