On 5/4/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote: [snip]
Now, I'd like you to think what Wikipedia and Wikimedia could do in response should thugs with money really try such an odious attack on us for writing obviously and blatantly encyclopedic information in an article, such as naming the damn key in the article about the damn key.
You tell 'em David!
Yea! and those evil thugs at Microsoft! We'll name the darn windows source code in the article about windows source code leaks, and screw them if they think they can stop us! and screw those prudes in the federal government, we will illustrate our articles about child porn with gosh-darn genuine freshly raped pre-teens if we damn well please! And whats this BS about worry about spreading libel about some dude? We're in the US-fkin-A and there ain't no one that can take away our FREE SPEECH, heck S230 says that we're always immune from liability for distributing material published by others, and as far as I can tell it doesn't matter if we know it's wrong or not! So who cares if we say that the Pope likes little boys? He's probably a jerk anyways. Someone wrote it, it's interesting, and encyclopedic so we should print it! Anything less would be some communist censorship bullshit!
*ahem* .. Now that .. that.. is out of my system.
David please consider that societies have long compromised freedom in the absolute sense to make our lives livable. Some times, they get the balance wrong... sometimes very wrong, and I strongly believe as individuals we should fight against it when they do. But we must remember that for *any* rule there will be some people who believe that ignoring it is the righteous thing to do.
I see nothing in your argument which would allow us, as a community, to choose to ignore some of these laws but not others, other than a roll of the dice and luck of the draw regarding the moral compass of those who have come to the table on whatever day the matter is discussed. I believe the logical and neutral conclusion of the position that it is okay for our project to ignore some laws because some member feels it is righteous is that we should ignore any law whenever some member thinks it is righteous.
I for one am really appreciative that our actions are constrained by law. We have found an amazing decision making process in NPOV, one which allows people of diverse background and beliefs to come to a consensus. But NPOV doesn't help us make value judgements. Many important things DO require value judgments, and I do not see that we have any track record in handling such things well. At least with the constraints of law I can feel comfortable that at our worst our community will not decide to do anything too awful, because the value judgements that prevent such things have often been made for us by our societies and codified into law.
Sometimes the law is a pain, sometimes it is wrong. But someday it might be the law, and only the law, that is keeping us from doing something utterly terrible ... Some days I think we're already there. I hope you keep this in mind the next time you suggest we *should* ignore the law because you personally think it would be righteous to do so, and because you think we could leverage our PR might to get away with it.