----- Original Message ----- From: "Delirium" delirium@rufus.d2g.com To: wikipedia-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2004 5:43 AM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Censorship and self-censorship [Ex: French netcensorship law]
Ruimu wrote:
...
I understand you're likely not a lawyer, but do you (or anyone else) know to what extent this requires *you* to be presenting the arguments, vs. reporting on others? For example, we *do* have articles on Holocaust deniers, summarizing their arguments (including that infamous "there were no Nazi gas chambers" report a few years back), and we *do* have information on the arguments of philosophers who wrote in favor of suicide. We're not personally promoting these viewpoints, but to be a reasonable encyclopedia we do have to give them a fair summary. In the Holocaust denier case we can fairly easily point to a lot of other evidence that the Holocaust actually did exist, and conclude that historians generally disagree with them, which probably covers us. But with suicide, we can't really reasonably conclude "these philosophers were wrong, and suicide is bad and you shouldn't do it", since there is no accepted consensus answer to "is suicide always bad, sometimes bad, or never bad?"
I hope the consensus is easier to find on "apologia for suicide is never good"...
So I guess my question is: can we still get in trouble for publishing a neutral description of pro- and anti-suicide arguments (and those in between), without concluding in favor of either?
I suppose that the answer is "non". As "neutral description" is usually very far from apologia, WP won't have any troubles. Same with negationism: what is forbidden is to deny the Holocaust existed, to report that someone denied it is not forbidden.