On Feb 5, 2008 9:32 PM, Ian Woollard ian.woollard@gmail.com wrote:
On 06/02/2008, Chris Howie cdhowie@gmail.com wrote:
Correction:
If another race/group/whatever imposes a rule on themselves then it is not racism to *refuse to* bend over backwards to make sure what you do doesn't break their rule.
Um, yes it is, depending on what 'bending over backwards' means in practice (often that bar is set ridiculously low).
Consider the case where the owner of a business may pass a rule that none of his staff may wear hats (just for simple uniform reasons).
Sounds reasonable, but in the UK, this was judged racist due to the large number of Pakistan immigrants that wore turbans, since they had to wear turbans for religious/cultural reasons, and since it greatly reduced their chances of getting employment, and hence caused economic hardship. Similar deal with some jewish people.
Wikipedia doesn't have such rules for employment, so I don't think this analogy is valid. It doesn't require people set aside their religious beliefs. As I said, they have a choice whether they want to look at those articles. Work is different -- you need to have a job to survive.
I really don't respect this argument you're making here Chris, it's more or less inherently racist, and your argument that it's all inherently simply 'PC' is not well founded. We need to have reasonable discussions about tradeoffs, not simply declare that there is absolutely no problem and not imply that anyone that anyone that thinks differently is 'insane'.
Insane within the goals of the project. WP:NPOV, WP:NOTCENSORED, neither of these have been addressed by people supporting the removal or suppression of these images.
I don't really respect your counterargument either. You're proposing that we cave to a minority that has a bone to pick with a project to build a free encyclopedia. We are in the (non-profit) business of providing information to people, including culturally relevant images that some people may find offensive. There are many ways they can protect themselves -- turn off images for example. This seems reasonable to me and doesn't require that we bend our core policies to appease anyone.
I do not see how any sane person could argue that this will make Wikipedia higher quality. Not one bit.
Quality is a lot to do with how well you meet the users requirements, needs or wishes; something that doesn't unnecessarily annoy the users would be considered higher quality.
The word I would dispute here is "unnecessarily." As I've said, there are things on Wikipedia I find offensive. The difference is I've learned that they are there for a reason and I don't have to raise hell about it. I stay away. What's so hard about that?
It comes down to the fact that some people want us to protect them from things they may not like. We only have to do this once before we're going to do it everywhere. [[Wikipedia:Content disclaimer]].