Unless I'm missing something, his examples "morphed photos of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, as well as pigs running through Islam's holy city of Mecca." sound like things that we would not be using in Wikipedia articles, except if the morphed image had gained sufficient notoriety that it merited an article, or at least a section in the article on the magazine or cartoonist who'd created it.
Unless he casts his net wider I'm personally more concerned about the sort of politicians who are prudish about nudity on the web and reluctant to have information about evolution in the classrooms.
WSC
Message: 10
Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 15:57:24 +0100 From: Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl Subject: [Foundation-l] Indian Minister Kapil Sibal Wants to Censor social To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 20111206155724.A14225@bruning.lan Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
media. Reply-To:
What to many appeared to be the abstractest of theory just a few months ago, is now becoming frightful reality :-( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16044554
Kapil Sibal's position seems to be pretty much exactly in line with our projected concept of image filtering (he practically literally uses the term), except he then extends the line all the way into censorship territory, without further scrupules.
If we had already gone ahead with the image filter as projected, we would be snookered by the time Kapil Sibal called our Indian office folks to his office.
With an image filter in place -pretty much exactly to Indian Government specification right off the shelf- there would be no way to argue that such a thing was impossible, difficult, or unconscionable.
We would have either been forced to censor some of our WM projects "You don't have enough image taggers for commons? I'm sure we can provide some", or withdraw from India. Since full-on censorship is intolerable, we would have been forced to withdraw.
Now we (still) have clean hands, and (with a bit of luck) can probably put down a strong(er) argument that can weather any Indian govt attacks on NPOV, should they come. If we are careful, we can likely do so politely and assertively, without hurting too many people's feelings.
(Also: seeing reporting on facebook and twitter activity, and having viewed pages from eg. Hindi Wikipedia, I do not believe that the Indian internet community shares Kapil Sibal's position. Though they'll have to speak for themselves, of course! :-)
On 06/12/2011 4:21 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
Unless he casts his net wider I'm personally more concerned about the sort of politicians who are prudish about nudity on the web and reluctant to have information about evolution in the classrooms.
The point is, many people (including myself) don't think there *is* a difference. Prudish about caricatures of colleagues, about images of Mohammad, about image of human genitalia, or about images of the holocaust (Hi, Mike!) are all the same thing with different targets. The sentiment is the same, and the danger to freedom of information is the same.
-- Coren / Marc
A useful update on this situation, for anyone interested:
http://blogs.outlookindia.com/default.aspx?ddm=10&pid=2665*
* On Wednesday 07 December 2011 04:09 AM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
On 06/12/2011 4:21 PM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
Unless he casts his net wider I'm personally more concerned about the sort of politicians who are prudish about nudity on the web and reluctant to have information about evolution in the classrooms.
The point is, many people (including myself) don't think there *is* a difference. Prudish about caricatures of colleagues, about images of Mohammad, about image of human genitalia, or about images of the holocaust (Hi, Mike!) are all the same thing with different targets. The sentiment is the same, and the danger to freedom of information is the same.
-- Coren / Marc
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