Re: [WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 10:59:56AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote: Thanks for your response. I think some of my points may have not been as clear as I hoped, since some of your responses are responding to things I didn't actually say. Please allow me to clarify: Right! That means your censorship proposal fails to represent the views of people who _do_ want religious censorship. That means it's non-neutral: it represents only one POV about what should be censored (the anti-sex view) and not another (the anti-blasphemy view). Right! Each of those censorship bodies expresses particular views about what is "bad" or "explicit". Those groups are not bound by an NPOV policy; indeed, they are frequently commercial firms hired for the purpose of enforcing particular religious and moral points of view. However, Wikipedia is supposed to be neutral. It isn't up to us to say that nipples are "explicit" and elbows are not. Our policy against self-censorship is still a consensus policy, though. Censorship proposals (such as [[WP:TOBY]]) have been consistently and roundly rejected. (I wasn't sure if this point was too subtle. I guess it was.) The "material" I was referring to was censorship tags. Adding those tags to Wikipedia articles, for the purpose of getting those articles censored, is against the policy that Wikipedia doesn't do censorship. No. Writers will be discouraged from writing on topics which won't be seen because of censorship measures. No. The coverage of [[sex]] and [[breast cancer]] and [[testicle]] and [[abortion]] and [[mastectomy]] and [[Playboy magazine]] and [[nude]] will be worse because people will be less interested in writing if they think the audience is smaller. Or, to pick another popular censorship topic -- violence -- the coverage of [[war]] and [[murder]] and [[AK-47]] and [[crushing by elephant]] and [[electrocution]] and [[Quake III Arena]] and [[terrorism]] will be worse, because people will be less interested in writing if they think the audience is smaller. People write to be read. The effect of censorship measures is to reduce the size of the audience. (If a "censorship" measure does not prevent anyone from reading the "censored" material, then it is _ineffective_.) If the audience size is reduced, then the incentive to write is reduced. People will also be less interested in writing if they are made to feel _unwelcome_ by measures that label their work as suitable for censoring. But that leads into the next objection ... No. Labelling it as "unsuitable for reading" amounts to a personal attack on the contributors. Any time you enable censorship of particular material, you are making a claim that it is unfit to be read. In order to be effective, a censorship measure must actually accomplish censorship -- that is, it must stop someone from reading the material censored. If you were to label my work in such a way that enables censorship measures, then you would be making an implicit value judgment that my work _should_ be censored; that the world is better off if my work is censored than if it is not. You would be saying that people need to be protected from my work; that it will harm them or corrupt them; in effect, that I have done something dangerous (or at least negligent) by writing it in the first place ... or indeed, that I _am_ something dangerous for _wanting_ to write about it. These statements would be attacks upon my character, and as such in violation of [[WP:NPA]]. To put it another way: Why do we have a rule against personal attacks? Because personal attacks make people feel less welcome and less willing to collaborate. Calling someone's work smutty or harmful to minors will have that very same effect. Not really. How would you like it if someone went around to _your_ contributions and marked them up in ways you found insulting and derogatory? That would be a bad thing, and nobody should do it. It would be disrespectful of you as a contributor, and it would also be a violation of Wikipedia policy.