On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:33:10 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
Again, really, this is just extremely over the top.
Tell you what, if
you go out and find someone in the wikipedia community who says "I
have the right to complete exclude the other side because I have a
commandment from god to rid the world of such ideas" then by all means
drag them in here to the mailing list so we can make fun of them.
It'll be great fun.
It's not over the top, it's calling a spade a spade. There are a
number of people that go around trying to remove images like the
clitoris picture. I'm sure you've seen some of the edit wars... They
might not directly tell you that they believe they've been commanded
by god, but that is basically what they are saying when their basis is
in their scripture.
... and we already do laugh at them, some of those talk pages and edit
summs are a laugh a minute.
I think the issues have been handled well thus far, at least on the
English wikipedia (the only one I am able to read, since I am multi
linguistically handicapped). Which is why I'm not bringing in
boatloads of concrete examples the generally process on the bigger
wikipedias appears to be working pretty well.
If we were to say that we will not treat neutrality in other languages
as less important just because fewer people in that language advocate
neutrality, then I think we are in agreement as this was the heart of
my initial complaint.
In the meantime, let's try to address the
arguments of people who are
actually engaged in this discussion. I think that virtually everyone
comes down along a spectrum in the broad middle which says: (a) there
are universal standards and (b) there are local cultural
considerations as well, so that (c) we expect some things to be more
or less universal, but we can also have some local flavor.
When you say standard here you are talking about a standard that says
which material is good/bad and thus should be included an excluded.
It sounds like you divorce this from keeping a neutral point of view,
but I don't see how that is possible.