----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Gervai" grin@tolna.net To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 11:39 PM Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] French net censorship law
On Wed, Jan 14, 2004 at 11:05:49PM +0800, Ruimu wrote:
How might this bill affect Wikipedia, if I go through with plans to set up a French nonprofit?
Not much, I guess, except if Wikipedia becomes a den of negationists (revisionist seems to be the only translation but I don't like it as any historian is "revising" History), suicide apologists, or paedophiles.
Maybe you're low on imagination. For example what if there's an article on
a
politician which describes what he really have done, but what he does not like to have published? (Monsieur XY member of the parliament raped his 3 daughters and the dog of the neighbour at age 12.) Or criticising (providing alternative points of view of) political moves, like cutting countries apart, killing people, etc?
Oh well, maybe I get it wrong. It would happen in Hungary.
Well, erh... It's not my imagination. I listed those few topics (I may have missed a couple more) that are actually under legal censorship in France. (The law against negationism is, imho, a very awful law, one of the worst in this country, but a necessary one in the context.) Censorship means here that it is forbidden to publish a book that will be an apology of suicide, paedophilia, or denying the reality of some crimes against humanity (without having to prove anything). If you write a book stating that "Mr XY raped Z...", you may face a libel suit, and have to prove your allegations. (That's very different, as you can see.)
Censorship is a bad thing, but, except if you strongly believe that ALL mens are good (at least "good enough"), it cannot be abandonned without being replaced by something else. This "something else" could be (or has to be, imho) replaced by self-censorship. Self-censorship is merely when you don't reply to a Wikipedian that he is a pure idiot, even if you strongly think that it is absolutely true. On usenet, I found an easy way to censor myself: switch of "send immediatly" and always wait for the next day to send my burning reaction. You can't imagine how many lines I have dropped this way (and, incidentally, how many spelling and grammar mistakes that have been fixed). That's self-censorship. Sadly, I don't see how to do this in a simple way on Wikis.
Self-censorship is also here when one try not to push one's agenda too much, or not to write on topic where it is too hard to achieve (as Uncle Ed said). I used above the "good enough" expression: I think being "good enough" on WP means to be able to censor oneself (what is much harder than simply being polite).
P.S. : I know that censorship is a widely hated thing, so my ideas here may seem to be hateful for some of you. Please consider that I tried to soften them as much as possible, and that I'm not helped 'cause I'm not using my mother tongue. Many evil things are necessary (on WP, banning someone is this way; in society, I could say cops, laws, ...). Most of those evil things are bad (and rejected) when they come from outside, I mean from someone else. When you internalize them, they may not be so evil--that's my key point.
Ruimu wrote:
Well, erh... It's not my imagination. I listed those few topics (I may have missed a couple more) that are actually under legal censorship in France. (The law against negationism is, imho, a very awful law, one of the worst in this country, but a necessary one in the context.) Censorship means here that it is forbidden to publish a book that will be an apology of suicide, paedophilia, or denying the reality of some crimes against humanity (without having to prove anything). If you write a book stating that "Mr XY raped Z...", you may face a libel suit, and have to prove your allegations. (That's very different, as you can see.)
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?"
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?
-Mark
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