On Fri, 2003-05-16 at 01:00, Anthere wrote:

    Some parents and some schools may prefer not to let the kids
    see nudity.

    It is perhaps up to us to give them the ability to give access
    or not to give access to religious topics/political
    topics/sexuality topics...but it is not up to us to decide for
    them what they should do. By restricting information offered,
    one decide for others instead of letting people decide for
    themselves. Very bad.

Hear, hear!

While I'm not convinced that the particular image under discussion is the most appropriate, _some_ image is necessary to make that particular article complete and informative. An article with no photo will be limited in education value, and an article with no illustration at all will be sorely crippled.

When it comes to censorship and Wikipedia, there are a few things to remember:

* The GFDL license means that it's redistributable and modifiable. Groups who may be interested in providing a "safe", "fact-checked", or "family-friendly" version of Wikipedia and promote it to censor-happy schools are free to do this. The main Wikipedia site doesn't *have* to cater directly to the censorware-limited market in order to be available there.

* Erik and other have advocated building a "certification team" system directly into Wikipedia, such that groups or individuals could verify certain versions of various articles as being good (for whatever their criteria are), and people could choose to view only the articles marked by some particular group. This could be useful here as well.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Anthere-

Hmmmm...the english wiki is willing to report law condemnation and to censor erotic picture.

I strongly object to this characterization. The picture was not removed for being explicit, it was removed because the copyright status was unclear and the picture itself not particularly helpful. A different photo under the FDL or in the PD would be perfectly acceptable.

Regards,

Erik

On Fri, 16 May 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 06:04:26 -0700 (PDT) From: Daniel Ehrenberg littledanehren@yahoo.com Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: The clitoris guy

--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:

<snip>

...

helpful. A different photo under the FDL or in the PD would be perfectly acceptable.

PD?

Public Domain

Alex R. wrote in part:

As far as the _very_ strict puritanic tradition in the US, perhaps there should be a wiki server in Canada or some other country that is more liberal minded in some respects about allowing people to discuss and publish/broadcast "taboo" subjects.

Right, we need 3 servers in all (as I see it): * A server in the US for its protection of political expression; * A server in France for its acceptance of nudity; and * A server in Australia for its short copyright protection. ^_^

-- Toby

How can reporting the law and the opinions of the people be considered something that should be subject to censorship? I know there is the European HR tradition of limiting free speech for specific reasons, but such censorship of legal opinions and legal arguments goes to the core of one's conception of a free and democratic society.

I think the french law is certainly far less restricting than the current censorship imposed on the french wiki. Typical subjects censored are everything around race, racialism, racism, nazism, fachism, holocause, judaism, racist insults, lepen...

However, censorship can also be more snicky

For example, Jos� Bove article is also censored. The reason given of the censorship (aside from censoring editors because they use the same nick than other contributors) is that adding too much of one side would unbalance the article. As a consequence, the solution chosen is not to put more of the minor side, but rather to remove some of the major side. Which is quite a interesting option toward success of a complete article. One has the right to add a fact only he is similarly himself add the other side.

I think the problem was solved this morning as someone created another Jos� Bov� article (called [[Jos� Bov�/NPOV]]). This article removed in particular the whole list of condemnations of Jos� Bov� by french law except one in 1998. In case some of you don't know, Jos� is currently in prison for his illegal (by french law) actions of destruction of gmo fields and mac donald.

However, indicating Jos� has been fined and is currently in prison is a POV statement and has clearly to be removed, as probably untrue.

I think it quite funny that previous contributors were censored as their additions were said liable by french law, and that now contributions are censored because they are reporting french law decisions.

Perhaps, the english article on Jos� Bov� could report the truth. Currently, it is a rather poor article.

completely agree this is shocking Anthere! Maybe there should be articles about these taboo French subjects on English pages. My French is good enough to translate into English, I am sure there are others who could help translate (even maybe getting it started with machine translation, that would be allowed under the open content license no? Perhaps you could put the banned French versions on English talk pages make a list called [[List of banned French pages translating into English]] and then we can built up the pages as people have time to translate them into English. Wouldn't it be o.k. to keep the French texts on the talk pages?

Interesting Most would be difficult to translate as not pages are usually censored, but part of the content. But, we could at least update the Bov� article I will think about that.

As far as the _very_ strict

puritanic tradition in the US, perhaps there should be a wiki server in Canada or some other country that is more liberal minded in some respects about allowing people to discuss and publish/broadcast "taboo" subjects.

Alex756

Interesting proposition. Especially since Canada is also speaking French. I note that no french canadian contributors has ever complained a contribution was liable by canadian law.

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Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:

--- Anthere anthere6@yahoo.com wrote:

...

Interesting proposition. Especially since Canada is also speaking French. I note that no french canadian contributors has ever complained a contribution was liable by canadian law.

Well, isn't the French Wiki Parisian French and not Canadian French? Is there a difference between the two when written?

The suituation is identical to the one between American and British English. It also comes up in Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch.

Ec