On 2/17/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 2/17/06, BJörn Lindqvist <bjourne(a)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