David,
I just noticed that I left a "bla" at the top of my reply to you. That wasn't a comment on your post: my e-mail editor often doesn't allow me to break the indent of the post I'm replying to. My work-around is to type some random unindented text at the top of my editor window, and then copy that down to the place where I want to insert a reply, so I can start an unindented line. That's what I did here; I just forgot to delete it before I posted.
Cheers, Andreas
From: Andreas Kolbe jayen466@yahoo.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Friday, 14 October 2011, 5:45 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
bla
From: David Levy lifeisunfair@gmail.com To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Friday, 14 October 2011, 3:52 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
I wrote:
In an earlier reply, I cited ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers and magazines that refuse to publish photographs of women. If this were a mainstream policy, would that make it "neutral"?
Andreas Kolbe replied:
NPOV policy as written would require us to do the same, yes.
The community obviously doesn't share your interpretation of said policy.
It's not a question of interpretation; it is the very letter of the policy. Due weight and neutrality are established by reliable sources.
Now, let's look at your example: if you and I lived in a society that did not produce reliable sources about women, and refused to publish pictures of them, then I guess we would be unlikely to work on a wiki that
- defines neutrality as fairly representing reliable sources without bias,
- derives its definition of due weight from the weight any topic (incl. women) is given in reliable sources,
- requires verifiability in reliable sources for every statement made in our wiki,
- and disallows original research.
Instead, we would start a revolutionary wiki with a political agenda that
- denounces the status quo,
- criticises the inhuman and pervasive bias against women,
- refuses to be bound by it,
- sets out to start a new tradition of writing about, and depicting, women,
- and vows to subvert the established system in order to create a new world.
We would set out to be *different* from the existing sources.
However, in our world, that is not how Wikipedia views reliable sources. Wikipedia is not set up to be in antagonism to its sources; it is set up to be in agreement with them.
Andreas
In the same way, if no reliable sources were written about women, we would not
be able to have articles on them.
The images in question depict subjects documented by reliable sources (through which the images' accuracy and relevance are verifiable).
Essentially, you're arguing that we're required to present information only in the *form* published by reliable sources.
By following sources, and describing points of view with which you personally do not agree, you are not affirming the correctness of these views. You are simply writing neutrally.
Agreed. And that's what we do. We describe views. We don't adopt them as their own.
If reliable sources deem a word objectionable and routinely censor it (e.g. when referring to the Twitter feed "Shit My Dad Says"), we don't follow suit.
The same principle applies to imagery deemed objectionable. We might cover the controversy in our articles (depending on the context), but we won't suppress such content on the basis that others do.
As previously discussed, this is one of many reasons why reliable sources might decline to include images. Fortunately, we needn't read their minds. As I noted, we *always* must evaluate our available images (the pool of which differs substantially from those of most publications) to gauge their illustrative value. We simply apply the same criteria (intended to be as objective as possible) across the board.
Images are content too, just like text.
Precisely. And unless an image introduces information that isn't verifiable via our reliable sources' text, there's no material distinction.
David Levy
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