On 2/17/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
On 2/17/06, BJörn Lindqvist bjourne@gmail.com wrote:
If Wikipedia isn't mine, then who owns it? Who gets to decide whether
Wikipedia is, to the best of my knowledge, owned by the Wikimedia Foundation.
I agree. But the Wikimedia Foundation only owns Wikipedia in one of thre three following facets of Wikipedia:
1. Wikipedia, the worlds biggest collection of organised information. 2. Wikipedia, the great community who have created #1. 3. Wikipedia, the trademark and the servers used to run #1.
You argued that since I am not a member of the Wikimedia Foundation I don't have the write to write "I'm a fish" on my user page, if I recall. Also, to the best of my knowledge the Wikimedia Foundation has not banned writing "I'm a fish" on my user page. And since you are not, AFAIK, a part of the Wikimedia Foundation you really can not ban writing "I'm a fish" on my user page.
Do you understand? The question of ownership is utterly irrelevant to this discussion. Neither you nor I are owners, therefore please do not try to make it sound like your opinion is the Wikimedia Foundation's one.
is no Wikipedia-rule against writing pedophile on your user page. I thought that was the whole reason for this email thread.
There isn't a rule against it, but it doesn't mean you have a right to either. Well, that's my interpretation.
IANAL: In conventional IRL law you usually do not talk about rights. You have crime and consequence. If you do X you will receive Y. If you murder someone you will get between 4-20 years in prison. If you drive to fast you will get a fine. You have the right to do anything that doesn't have a consequence. Actually, you can do whatever you want but if you are caught you'll suffer the consequences. Wikipedia rules and policies works similarilly. It doesn't state what rights users have. It states what we will do to users that commit actions that has consequences.
Your talk about right is irrelevant. The question is whether writing pedophile on your user page has a consequence or not.
Information has no moral value, it is neutral. It is the consumer of the information that may *choose* to being disrupted or offended. Each
Well that's one way of seeing it :)
If you ever take the time to go through the archives for wikien-l you will find hundreds of threads where people have tried to objectively assign an offensive value to some item. Is an image of clitoris offensive? Is an image of autofellatio offensive? Is a swastika offensive? Are the Muhammed cartoons offensive? All attempts to measure offensiveness has failed. What is extremely offensive to someone isn't offensive at all to someone else. It is very hard to see above ones own cultural values, but if you do you will see that I'm right.
and everyone is responsible for how he or she interprets the information and what "mood" that puts him or her in. Within reasonable limits of course - false information, hatespeech and goatse is not good and is not allowed on Wikipedia.
Sure, I can wander down the street waving a stick and anyone who "chooses" to get hit by it is responsible. Not a very useful model for building a community IMHO.
Try another analogy because this one just doesn't make sense.
I think you're mischaracterising free speech. You can say what you want on the inside of *your* front door. I'm fairly certain that if you wrote a detailed plan for assassinating the president on the outside of your front door, you would regret it once the police found out.
I don't know the technical name of the crime, but I do know that it is a crime planning to assassinate the president. It has nothing to do with free speech.
Quite the contrary, it is important to emphasize that there is no protection for offensiveness for anyone.
Not true. We have policies for civility and that includes not using offensive language, personal attacks etc. We don't guarantee anyone a swearword-free environment, but we do try and make it pleasant.
A long time ago, in a thread similar to this, someone said that he was offended by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine because he had a latent drinking problem. He and many others (me included) shouldn't visit certain parts of Wikipedia if we don't want to be offended. If you are offended by someone saying that he or she is a pedophile, then I don't think you should visit Wikipedia at all.
-- mvh Björn