Jayjg wrote:

Wow, what astounding rhetoric. "Censorship".

That's not rhetoric. It's precisely the right term to describe what you're trying to do. The Encyclopedia Brittanica defines censorship as the "act of changing or suppressing speech or writing that is considered subversive of the common good." Wikipedia defines it as "the removal and withholding of information from the public by a controlling group or body. Typically censorship is done by governments, religious groups, online communities or the mass media, although other forms of censorship exist." Both of those seem to me to aptly describe what you're trying to do.

Of course, it's not GOVERNMENT censorship. Rather, it's an attempt to ban a class of speech on Wikipedia via a policy. What makes it censorship is the supporters of BADSITES are attempting to create a whole class of forbidden-in-advance speech, arrogating unto themselves the right to determine what information other people can include when editing Wikipedia in the future. Does someone want to link to something on WR so they can comment on its errors? Do they want to link to it on a talk page because they think it actually has made a valid point about something? What if WR actually DOES make a valid point about something? If we have a policy against ever linking to WR, none of those questions matter. Individual Wikipedians have to surrender to the policy, regardless of context, circumstances and their individual judgment as to appropriateness. That's what makes it censorship, in the same way that it would be censorship to say that no one can ever post an image of a nude body part or a swastika or some other thing that someone finds offensive.

Maybe the following example will clarify my point further: I would fully agree with someone's editorial insistence that we shouldn't have an image of a swastika in an article about the Catholic Church. By supporting this position, I'm not engaging in censorship. I'm simply making an editorial judgment that a swastika is inappropriate for inclusion in an article about the Catholic Church. However, I WOULD consider it appropriate to include an image of a swastika in an article about Nazis. In other words, I think the question of whether a swastika belongs in an article should be left up to sensible editors who make their judgments based on context and appropriateness, NOT on some policy imposed by someone who thinks they have the right to forbid anyone else from ever doing it under any circumstances whatsoever. See the difference? What Jayjg wants to do is forbid anyone else from ever posting a link to WR anywhere on Wikipedia under any circumstances whatsoever. That's censorship.

I should also note that the supporters of BADSITES are really attempting to censor a very specific type of information, while dressing up this specific goal under generalities to make it sound like something that would be a appropriate as a "policy." What they really want to do is specifically ban all links to WR, but this is being dressed up as a policy against "linking to attack sites." If they simply wanted to ban links to WR, I would actually have less problem with it. Such a policy would be a mistake, in my view, but it is less open-ended and therefore less likely to be abused than generalizing out from WR to some broader, vaguely-defined category such as "attack sites."

This whole discussion reminds me a bit of a debate that happened at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a decade or so ago, when some well-meaning opponents of pornography tried to get the concession stand at the UW student center to stop selling Penthouse and Playboy magazines. Some university bureaucrat briefly attempted to impose a Solomonic solution by forbidding the student center from selling monthly magazines. The idea was that weekly magazines like Time or Newsweek could still be sold. It would eliminate Penthouse and Playboy but wouldn't really be censorship, because the CONTENT of the magazines wasn't the reason given to ban them. This of course was nonsense. The late, great Erwin Knoll (then-editor of The Progressive, a monthly magazine published in Madison), wrote a humorous column suggesting that the university should just adopt a policy forbidding the sale of all magazines whose names begin with the letter "P." To do so, he argued, would be no more arbitrary and would still have the desired effect of eliminating Playboy and Penthouse (and also the Progressive) but would at least leave other monthly magazines unaffected.

In a similar vein, I would like to suggest that if Jayjg and Slim Virgin wish to find a policy-based way of banning links to Wikipedia Review, they should at least try to do so under the narrowest possible policy defining the thing they are trying to ban. A lot of rhetoric has been thrown around saying that Wikipedia Review is guilty of libel, harassment, stalking, even terrorism. Each of those acts, if indeed they have been committed, are real crimes. Someone who commits libel or stalking can be taken to court and convicted, fined, even jailed. If Wikipedia Review is committing those sorts of crimes, the victims can pursue legal remedies and get a court judgment so that we have a basis for common agreement that WR's actions do indeed reach the level of criminality that those terms imply. Once someone has won a court judgment showing that WR has engaged in illegal harassment, I would accept a policy saying that Wikipedia should ban all links to websites whose owners have been convicted of criminal harassment against Wikipedians.

If, on the other hand, you can't prove in a court of law that Wikipedia Review has actually done something illegal, you should just grow a thicker skin. As a very wise cop once told me, part of the price of living in a free society is that you sometimes have to tolerate unpleasant behavior by obnoxious individuals.

-------------------------------- | Sheldon Rampton | Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org) | Author of books including: | Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities | Toxic Sludge Is Good For You | Mad Cow USA | Trust Us, We're Experts | Weapons of Mass Deception | Banana Republicans | The Best War Ever -------------------------------- | Subscribe to our free weekly list serve by visiting: | http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html | | Donate now to support independent, public interest reporting: | https://secure.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/cmd/shop/ custom.jsp?donate_page_KEY=1107 --------------------------------