koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com writes:
There are plans afoot to spin off Nupedia and Wikipedia into a non-profit organization. This is by no means certain, [...]
[...] Even some of the comments on various /Talk pages might be enough to cause a challenge to the 501c3 tax exemption; [...]
In my mind, tax exemption is not the only reason for a non-profit organisation. It's nice to have, of course.
But you're poking something that I've mulled over for some days: what about, hmm, "restricted" speech in general?
Say that someone describes how Adobe e-books work so exactly, that it is trivial for a programmer to circumvent the puny "encryption". Or the same for DVD content protection. There are also classics like descriptions of the production process of cocain or semtex[1].
I find all these interesting from a theoretical point of view. Normal encyclopedias get by with not going into too much detail, but of course WikiIsNotPaper, so if some more-or-less-anonymous contributor created a neutral article, we have no such excuse.
On the other hand, Bomis, Jimbo, or whoever can be reasonably connected with the site, would take some risk of prosecution. Is this something we just accept? Should we censor ourselves? Our peers? Leave it to the risk-takers to censor?
Footnotes: [1] BTW, I've now searched for all four terms, and found nothing concrete.