On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 12:16 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
I absolutely disagree with that. Like I said, neutrality does not
equal
moral relativism. An encyclopedia *must* decide what is and isn't acceptable. There is no choice *except* to decide that.
Why not? What happens if we choose not to decide that?
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice." Seriously, though, if you don't decide what to include and what not to include, then you haven't created an encyclopedia, you've created a blob of random bits
of
content.
Oh, sure, we need to decide what is acceptable in terms of notability and verifiability, that's not the same as deciding what is morally acceptable which is what we are talking about here.
What are notability and verifiability but decisions of what is morally acceptable?
Yes, Florida law (although I think UK law is pretty similar in this regard). It's not neutral, it's arbitrary, but we have no choice in the matter.
That's exactly the point I made above, though. You have to choose. Why choose arbitrarily?
Because we have no choice. You don't choose to obey the law, you have to do it or you get stopped.
Wikipedia certainly chooses what jurisdiction to base itself in.
What legal content under Florida law isn't acceptable? And says who?
The [image of the] beheading of Nick Berg seems to be legal under Florida
law. But I don't
find it acceptable, and neither do a majority of Wikipedians. That's
just
one example though. There are an infinite number of them.
Well, yes, we make an exception for things that don't significantly add to the article, which that wouldn't. People have a pretty good idea of what a beheading looks like, so you don't really need to show them. I guess that is somewhat arbitrary, but there are exceptions to every rule.
The exact same argument could be made for the Virgin Killer album as for the Nick Berg beheading image. The image itself was the cause of controversy, and the controversy could not be completely understood without seeing the actual image.
Anyway, my point in bringing this up was not to argue about the Nick Berg image or the VK one. It was to give an example of something I consider legal but not acceptable, which you requested.
There's clearly no mens rea on the part of record shop owners at this
point.
Generally (by my understanding) mens rea means you knew what you were doing, it doesn't require you to know that it was illegal.
There are different levels of mens rea, but such a case would likely fail on all such levels. I don't think you can prove that a record shop owner even knew that he was in possession of that album. As for knowledge of the contents of the album, again, I don't think you can prove that a shop owner knows the contents of all his albums. And on top of that, I'm not a legal expert, but I would think there would be some leeway given for the grey-area nature of this particular album.