Hi all. Thanks so much for all the encouragement my last email received. Replying to Ting's:
****Point 1-- NOTCENSORED isn't what you think it is:****
So, the first thing to realize is that our NOTCENSORED policies are far more narrow than you seem to suspect:
• In the case of traditional fishing techniques or traditional medicine, no one claims those subjects are too offensive to cover. So our NOTCENSORED policy can offer absolutely no guidance one way or the other.
• Our "No pedophilia advocacy" doesn't apply to our content. Indeed, we do cover pedophilia advocacy when it's encyclopedic (e.g. [[NAMBLA]]).
• The debate over at Acehnese Wikipedia over Muhammad IS partially about censorship. But it's also about whether local-projects have self-determination via CONSENSUS. I feel Acehnese Wikipedia should be allowed to run their project as they think best, including revising or even outright rejecting their own version of NOTCENSORED if their true consensus supports doing so. (Ideally they could used some name other than "Wikipedia", so that the "Wikipedia" brand would be preserved for NPOV/NOTCENSORED projects-- but in truth, even that doesn’t really disturb me.
So, we're substantially less fundamentalist and fanatical than I think you believe we are. NOTCENSORED isn't a universal call to total inclusionism, it's just a reminder to not let potential-offensive make decisions for us.
Look at the following dialogue:
Question: Should we host content X? Answer: No, because I find it offensive. Reply: Offensiveness isn't a valid reason, per NOTCENSORED. Instead, ask-- is this content useful?
That's it! That's all NOTCENSORED is. The NOTCENSORED policy just means we don't let cultural taboos dictate our editorial decisions. It's a core value that is really not as radical as you seem to think it is.
****Part 2: What a NOTCENSORED debate looks like:
So, let's consider the EnWiki article [[Muhammad]] and the debate over its use of potentially-offensive images.
Arguing that we should "delete all images because they're offensive" is automatically rebutted by citing "Wikipedia isn't censored".
But that's not the end of the discussion, it's only the very beginning. Once we agree that offensiveness isn't a valid criteria, we still have to tackle the actual work of making the best possible article.
So, just a few of the current compromises that have been reached on [[Muhammad]]:
* We all agreed that the top image should be Muhammad's name written in beautiful calligraphy, since that's a traditionally depicted in Islam and reflects its anti-depiction stance. * We agreed to be careful that our images weren't unnecessarily large or unreasonably numerous. * We decided, throughout the main article, to rely primarily upon images from Islamic cultures-- they seemed to best illustrate Muhammad himself, rather than using him as a just a symbol of Islam. * We agreed that Western images tell us more about "Muhammad-as-viewed-from-the-West", and thus we only used them when in the "Western Views of Muhammad" section. * We all agreed that controversial cartoons of Muhammad had very very little to tell us about Muhammad himself, and thus had no place in the Muhammad article. * We made a Frequently-asked-questions list to try to sincerely explain that we truly we weren't trying to cause offense or be anti-Muslim. We also explained about image filtering and how a reader can decide for themselves what to view. * We recognized the need for on-going communication created a special talk page just to engage in respectful dialogue with people concerned about the use of Muhammad images. * Most of us tried very very hard to be as empathic and caring as possible in those discussions. Indeed, we routinely pointed to the Christian taboos like pornography and piss-christ, using our coverage of those taboos in order to prove that we weren't singling out Muslims.
So, in practice, NOTCENSORED doesn't make things black and white at all. There are lots of shades of gray. There's respectful debate and civil discussion. There's an evolving mutual understanding between groups. We came together and hammered out a well-thought-out consensus that struck a balance between our sincere desire not to offend and our essential mission to inform.
You may not think it's the perfect solution, and neither do I. I'm a free-speecher, so I'm not happy that we made agreed to make the images as smal as we did Of course, others feel the images are too big. The consensus there will continue to evolve over time-- but the process basically worked.
Except for new users, our Muslim editors don't expect that their own offense can justify deleting legitimately educational images. Similarly, our free-speech editors don't expect that NOTCENSORED would justify inserting the anti-Muslim cartoons into the article. Everyone can see there's a consensus in place, and just about everyone understands that their individual opinions shouldn't be able to overrule that consensus.
So, specific debates involving NOTCENSORED do come up all the time. Through civility, mutual respect, and consensus, those disputes are routinely resolved without much strife. Been happening for nine years, and it works.
**** Part 3: So where'd all that anger come from? ****
If NOTCENSORED doesn't usually result in incivility, what was it about the NOPORN proposal that made things so intensely heated and so 'fanatical'???
Earlier I something like:
Many of us thought that, via projects like Wikimedia, we were helping to eliminate censorship from the rest of the world. … Some of us are here because we want to help STOP censorship around the world, not help perpetuate it, and certainly not become subjected to it ourselves.
(my original words have been revised for clarity)
I think you read my original words as something far more radical than I meant.
Basically, I was just asserting that: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression, including the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." (language from Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
I just meant that I do hope that the existence of WMF will, to some extent, help promote this most fundamental of human rights.
Since the word 'censorship' appears to have a much broader meaning to you than to me, it may have seemed that I was suggesting something very controversial. In truth, I don't think I meant anything particularly controversial though (unless of course the Universal Declaration of human rights is itself controversial).
I am not comparing any Wikimedian with the Red Guards. But read the lines above make me flinch. A stigma from my childhood.
I'll try to talk about this more in a private, but speaking only for myself, I think this was a very helpful statement, in that it sort of jolted me into seeing things from your point of view. I know it's sometimes bad manners to compare anyone to nazis or their analogs, but in this case, it furthered the discussion and promoted empathy.
Having read your words, I can certainly see why the recent debates might have provoked that kind of emotion. In particular, there's been a lot of talk about removing people from leadership for having beliefs that differ from the community's beliefs. From your vantage point, I'm sure have looked a little fanatical purge to root out leaders who differed from the community.
But-- I don't think the 'fanaticism' is over NOTCENSORED itself. We do welcome a diversity of beliefs on NOTCENSORED. Lots and lots of people have expressed the belief that Muhammad images shouldn't be on the Muhammad article, and we've never asked anyone to give up any of their user rights over that. People question the reasonable limits of NOTCENSORED all the time, and those discussions are usually quite civil.
The reason things go so heated wasn't because of NOTCENSORED, it was because of CONSENSUS.
At several points, we were told that Jimmy's new NOPORN policy would be enforced as policy even though consensus had firmly rejected it.
THAT is where the really really fanatical emotions come from. So long as consensus is in place, all ideas on changing NOTCENSORED are totally open to discussion, include the idea to remove NOTCENSORED entirely.
But CONSENSUS is different. Consensus IS the project. People have donated their time, energy, and money-- and as a result, they do feel a certain very-limited 'ownership'. The idea that this is _our_ site, rather than any one individual's site, is the fuel Wikipedia runs on. That idea is why people people participate and why people donate.
When Jimmy acted as if his own opinions should trump a strong community consensus-- THAT's when things got fanatical and uncivil. He made it clear that his new NOPORN policy wasn't, in his eyes, up for debate-- so people stopped bothering to debate it with him. Instead, we started requesting resignations and contacting other organizations that would be interested in becoming the new host for Wikipedia-as-it-is.
NOTCENSORED isn't what made things so black-and-white-- CONSENSUS is the black and white issue. NOPORN was on one side of the debate and community consensus was on the other. By trying to enforce NOPORN, people essentially tried to ignore and subvert CONSENSUS.
Only when it looked like CONSENSUS was going out the window did the poo really hit the fan.
--
And I don't think there's anything specific to this particular issue. It's not as if the fanatical objections all came from a Porn-centered wikiproject or from editors who upload porn. The objects came from all over the community, from people like me who had never even uploaded a single potentially-pornographic image.
If the board tried to forcibly overrule ANY sufficiently-cherished consensus, you'd see similar behavior from the community-- the petitions being circulated, with people constructing guillotines and dunce caps, and arguing that heads need to roll to restore community consensus to its rightful place.
The 'fanaticism' wasn't because a few people had an opinion that differed from the community's established consensus-- the fanaticism came out when they tried to actually ENFORCE a new policy by ignoring a very strong and long-standing consensus.
Alec