On Sep 26, 2004, at 3:05 AM, Christopher Mahan wrote:
--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
Like I said, no article.
We're building an encyclopedia, not an activist website.
"Having no article" in order to pander to censorship is activism of the worst kind...
I agree with you. If it is to pander to censorship.
However, it is for balance.
If you opened a book about French history, and the entire book was about the french atrocities in Algeria in the 50's, then the book would be biased, because if didn't mention the rest of the 1600 years and the contributions of countless millions. If the book's title was: "French atrocities in Algeria", it would be apropos. But if the book's title was "The History of France" then that would be wrong, no matter how correct the content was itself.
I hope you understand what I'm getting at.
It might be gauche to point this out, but the long digression on the state of the Chinese government isn't relevant to the present question. The present question is not "what would I do if I were in the shoes of someone deciding which sites to censor?" But "what do we do to deal with present attempts to censor wikipedia."
If you feel that there are articles that need balancing, then by all means, balance them - it is part of the work we do here, balancing articles, particularly those that have been tilted by common, but narrow, points of view.
However, that is beside the point, in that many of the entities that decide, or will decide in the future, to censor Wikipedia will not care about the process, but about whether the bottom line meets their needs. This means that wiki will often be censored even, or perhaps especially, when there are POVs documented in an article which upset various holders of the status quo.
This kind of POV processing isn't what will respond to the situation, without some feedback mechanism, we could be altering information that has nothing to do with why wikipedia is being blocked. Anyone who has dealt with the decision to make secret or classify information knows that often information is not classified for reasons that are rational to the outside world. Censoring and blocking is the same way. Articles on websites are censored or blocked, as often as not, based on algorythms: banning all sites that contain certain percentages of certain words. For all anyone here knows, wiki was blocked by a program, and then later unblocked by a human being who realized that the block was not appropriate.
Until there is some data - which can only be acquired by opening lines into the PRC - this discussion is a reflection about how people feel about China, and not about how to make sure that wiki is accessible to its user base, who are the people who we should be more focused on.