On 17/02/2008, Screamer <scream(a)datascreamer.com> wrote:
I don't think anyone stated in this thread that we
were misrepresenting
cultural of religious beliefs.
I believe that we are, by over-emphasis.
I believe the subject at hand is about making the
article more palatable
on such a sensitive subject where the exposure of a picture offends an
entire people.
I don't think so, I think this is a policy question; and DEPENDING on
what policy gets decided it can be decided what actions to take.
Some *different* policies could be:
1. we don't censor articles at all
2. we don't censor the *wikipedia* (but we can move things around to
minimise offense- e.g. a principle of least surprise
3. we do censor the wikipedia
4. we decide a context for the wikipedia (e.g. it's a purely western
encyclopedia), and tune it to follow those mores (i.e. not censored
but in accordance with emphasis expected from a Western encyclopedia)
5. we decide that the Muhammad article is currently out of line with
the majority of sources on Muhammad, and fix it (in other words policy
is fine, but the article is an inaccurate precis).
6. current policy is perfect, current Muhammad article is perfect,
they're just a bunch of whingers.
This is not intended to be a complete or accurate list; it's an
example, feel free to discuss/propose policies.
./scream
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.