On Tue, 13 Nov 2007 08:52:58 -0500, "Alec Conroy" alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
Yes. And sometimes, at present, this is then reverted with "how dare you suppress this! censorship!"
What we don't want censored is Wikipedia. That's the super-precious thing to cling to. That's the point of the project. That's why this is special and magical.
But nobody's doing that. Don't make the mistake of thinking that a link to a hate site is ion some way "content". The content is what we say about the subject, not the links at the end.
We could remove the hotlink from www.stormfront.org and it would have no effect at all on the neutrality of our description of that site.
Nor does removing the occasional statement in debate that "stormfront says this, it should be in the article!" materially affect the neutrality of any other subject. Stormfront is very obviously not a reliable source.
And let's be clear here, the sites we're talking about are *not reliable sources* for anything at all - not for critique of Wikipedia, and definitely not for content.
What's special about Wikipedia is that Wikipedia is not Censored.. It's breadth is so beyond anything that's ever existed. We have an article on anything and everything.
This principle has been widely misunderstood, in my view. People have used it to justify linking to harassment, egregious violations of WP:BLP, gratuitous images of sexually explicit material. What WP:NOT censored means is that we do not censor material in order to avoid offending specific real-world cultural mores. Wikipedia is not censored for the protection of minors, or to prevent children in the American deep south for learning that great-great-great-to the tenth-grandpa was more monkey than Moses. We include the Mohammed cartoons, the article on penis has a picture of a penis, and we don't shy form covering controversial content.
But we do self-censor. We do it all the time. WP:BLP is 100% self-censorship. So is WP:NOR. We don't include any old thing just because someone wants to, we include it only when it is of direct benefit to the core aims of producing a verifiable, neutral encyclopaedia.
And again, links *are not content*.
Guy (JzG)