On 26 August 2011 02:15, David Goodman dggenwp@gmail.com wrote:
make it plainer, that people who find Wikipedia articles appropriate for advocating their religious beliefs may use the content for that purpose, to that the WMF should find some universally acceptable sets of spiritual beliefs, and use its content to advocate them. Taking one of the proposed possibilities (probably the one that instigated this), providing for censoring images on the grounds of sexual content is doing exactly that for views on sexual behavior. We're officially saying that X is content you may find objectionable, but Y isn't. That's making an editorial statement about what is shown on X and Y.
I've finally twigged what's worrying me about this discussion.
We're *already* making these editorial statements, deciding what is and isn't appropriate or offensive for the readers on their behalf, and doing it within articles on a daily basis.
When we, as editors, consider including a contentious image, we have a binary choice - do it or don't do it. It's not like text, where we can spend a nice meandering paragraph weighting the merits of position A and position B and referring in passing to position C; the picture's there or it isn't, and we've gone with the "inclusionist" or the "exclusionist" position. At the moment, there is a general consensus that, more or less, we prefer including images unless there's a problem with them, and when we exclude them, we do so after an editorial discussion, guided by policy and determined by our users on the basis of what they feel is appropriate, offensive, excessively graphic, excessively salacious, etc.
In other words, we decide whether or not to include images, and select between images, based on our own community standards. These aren't particularly bad as standards go, and they're broadly sensible and coherent and clear-headed, but they're ours; they're one particular perspective, and it is inextricably linked to the systemic bias issues we've known about for years and years. This is a bit of a weird situation for us to be in. We can - and we do - try hard to make our texts free of systemic bias, of overt value judgements, and so forth, and then we promptly have to make binary yes-or-no value judgements about what is and isn't appropriate to include in them. As Kim says upthread somewhere, these judgements can't and won't be culturally neutral.
(To use a practical example, different readers in different languages get given different sets of images, handled differently, in comparable Wikipedia articles - sometimes the differences are trivial, sometimes significant. Does this mean that one project is neutral in selection and one not? All sorts of cans of worms...)
As such, I don't think considering this as the first step towards censorship, or as a departure from initial neutrality, is very meaningful; it's presuming that the alternative is reverting to a neutral and balanced status quo, but that never really existed. The status quo is that every reader, in every context, gets given the one particular image selection that a group of Wikipedians have decided is appropriate for them to have, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis...