On 11/13/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG guy.chapman@spamcop.net wrote:
Yes. And sometimes, at present, this is then reverted with "how dare you suppress this! censorship!"
Well, as someone who has, on occasion, cried censorship, let me be clear here. I don't care about censoring any given <insert Enemy of the Project>. They aren't long censored anyway, as they easily take it off wiki.
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.
There have been encyclopedias before-- having an encyclopedia isn't that special-- especially not an encyclopedia you can only kinda trust. And we brag about being Free, but let's be fair-- every library in the developed world has many free [as in beer] encyclopedias-- so that's not really special. Some people might say the fact that you personally can edit Wikipedia is special, but to me, that's just a sidenote.
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.
I can remember being a kid and reading "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and wishing there really was a guide like that-- which hand entries on practically anything. I remember watching star trek and being jealous of their library computer which knew everything about everything. That's why Britannica doesn't have. THAT'S why we're different. That's why we're amazing. We are building the Hitchiker's Guide, we are building the Enterprise's library computer.
I didn't get to help build The Greay Pyramid. I wasn't an engineer on the Apollo Program. But I get to come home every day and work on a Wonder of the World-- Wikipedia. It takes your breath away, when you think about it. ---
Too often, when we hear "Don't censor that", I think people hear "Don't censor Brandt or Bagley or whomever". But that's missing the point. The point is: Don't Censor Wikipedia.
(and yes, yes, not all deletions are censorship, and half our value is in what we prune away, as opposed to the internet at large where there are no AFDs. But we must be ever vigilent against deleting or banning what we don't like because we don't like it.)
Alec