On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 01:12:27 -0800 (PST), Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: I don't think I am... Right, which is a reason why the image is useful.... It says that it is possible in a manner which is difficult for text or drawings to do alone. If we delete an informative part of the article because we think that autofellatio is bad, or because we think that images of nudity/sexuality are bad, it would be censorship *and* it would be nonneutral because we are deciding content based on the same type of value judgement you provided above. At least, that is my position. I think it's pretty obvious that some people are offended by the image, for they think images of such things are bad just as some are offended by the concept alone, and would like to see the whole thing deleted. Right, I don't argue for keeping it in talk pages.... Do you think that this isn't known to the people spamming the talk pages with this image? There are many many more offensive images on the internet, but they don't have a possible place on the wikipedia because they are not informative about such a subject. It's quite possible that the vandals motivate is to make a problem of the image so that you will have it deleted because they are morally opposed to it's availability.. And in that case, you are playing right into their wishes. We must consider the matters of censorship and vandalism as completely separate matters, unless we wish to be forced to abandon our ideals due to the agenda of anyone with a webbrowser and the time to vandalize. [snip guidelines examples] I contend that censorship is a matter of neutrality because it imposes good/bad value judgements on articles. What I'm reading here is that neutrality is negotiable. I did not think this was the case. I'm having a problem getting over the cognative dissonance here. People have differing views of what is right and wrong, this is true for people of the same culture or people of differing cultures. When we attempt to modify the article to fit our views and exclude others, this is non-neutral and this is censorship. For what it's worth, as best I can tell, the image is quite offensive to many people in the United States, ... This isn't a matter of it being non-offensive to one group and not others.

Gregory Maxwell a écrit: <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Well, we might agree to disagree then :-) You have a point here. not exist, it would be censorship. Na, you did not understand mine. I do not support its deletion due to the act being bad, nor to nudity being bad. I think that it is a delicate topic and we should be careful to limit rejection from readers. The very vivid colors of the picture, the sweat, the bestial look, the angle of pictures... all suggest porn. The picture is NOT pretty. I think sensible topics could be much less problematic is treated in a sensible manner. Here is what I would suggest. If you are still young enough and have a partner able to do decent pictures, please propose your own picture. Select soft colors, a pleasant angle of view, a neutral or just gently expecting look on your own face, and let's talk about it again ? Okay ? (I am serious). it is possibly displaying offensive content, or possibly not. autofellatio article, it is possibly admitting a taboo, or possibly not. This is not my position (no pun intended) people who do not expect to see such a picture on a talk page (while they can choose not to go to the autofellatio) lacking respect for other people time. It is unwikilove. Possibly. But my personal conviction this image was not okay for wikipedia was not spawned by its use on talk page. Agreed This is very unfortunate you chose not to comment on the examples. I think this is very relevant to the contrary. Most of you hardest core supporters of non-censorship, an opinion I respect, do not comment on where you would draw the hardline. I am sure you have a hardline just as anybody else, but you just put it further than we do. It might be informative to know where you put it. Classification of system to filter content do not do any different. They try to define level of "violence or sex" to define the different levels of filtering. If we admit that we have a sort of line, we might just as well try to define where it is. to try to set rules to attempt to follow the guidelines. mandatory guidelines/principles, but there is an equally strong desire to let editors create themselves their own rules to try to fit the guidelines. Unfortunately, we can not easily modify a picture. This is a black and white option. ...Though some attempts have been made on the clitoris picture. The best solution is probably to provide a picture which might be more acceptable by a larger set of body. yours, "non-neutral" is wrong. This is what you are doing. The decision of the english wikipedia is fine, but the rules applied on the english wikipedia, belongs to the english wikipedia. They should not impair the right of other communities to set their own rules, without those being called censorship. Sorry, I do not understand that sentence. Agreed. When Well, I tried to exclude an image. You tried to exclude people. These are different approaches. Telling people to fork is also a bit censorship, don't you think ? I do not hope to start a fight in saying this, but just to mention that it is very easy to talk about censorship, but it has several faces. Well, anyway, thanks for the more moderated tone, I appreciated. Hope I do not offend you in this mail. Do not wish to.

I don't know, Ant... I agree with everything you said except the unwikilove part. I know it takes time to clean up vandalism, but if you decide you are too tired of cleaning up a particular vandalism, then just stop cleaning it up and somebody else will. (not directed at you in particular, but the people who are complaining) Also, I think interwiki redirects should be kept, but redirects from articles to images should not. Mark On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 01:12:27 -0800 (PST), Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

First, let me apologise for the out of order reply... Gmail's threading system is terrible to say the least, and I've missed part of this discussion. On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:46:52 +0200, Anthere <anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Quite possibly, but I'd like to be sure that we actually disagree.. So here is what I think... 1. For the purpose of neutrality, images and text are not greatly different. If we shun text because we think it expresses a bad idea, then we are not being neutral. If we shun an image because it expresses a bad idea it is effectively the same. If we argue that we are not banning the topic but banning images of the topic, we have just changed ourself from making value judgments on the topic to judgments on "images of the topic", again, we are not neutral if we decide that "images of the topic" are bad. (because you could write an article about images of that topic and then the image becomes a direct matter) 2. Some people (at a minimum including the people whos concerns you are bringing up now, and possibly you) think that is would be good to have differing 'standards' for the acceptability of content in differing language wikis. 3. In order to be neutral, the primary standards we use to decide if content should be banned are: Encyclopedic (i.e. it's ability to inform and educate) and legal (do we have a right to distribute the content). 4. If we ban material because we think that it is bad, or represents evil, then we have imposed our values on the material and are thusly not talking a neutral position. 5. The concepts of encyclopedicness are generally universal: Material which informs, educates, and increases knowledge, will continue to do for speakers of other languages. (If translated as needed). 6. If we combine point (5) with point (2) we find that the reason for differing standards for other languages must necessarily be of a nature not related to encyclopedic value. This is undesirable due to point (3). I do not think that it is a leap to state that if we are not banning material because it does not convey knowledge, then we are very likely banning it because we believe that it is bad or evil. Have I made a mistake? If not, we run into (4).. We should not ban things because some people decide that they are evil. It's not my goal to argue for the picture, but yes.. I think I do have a point. But this point doesn't mean the image couldn't be improved or replaced with a better one... There are many ways we can address the issue, but removing things we dislike because we dislike them without primarily considering their potential value is a huge risk that I'd like for us to avoid. This is indeed a very complex topic. As it stand now, the english wikipedia in it's complete (and unvandalized) form would not be legally usable inside public primary schools in most of the United States. This is a huge potential audience for an encyclopedia (but perhaps not the most *important* audience for us, because it's likely that a proportionately smaller number of good editors will come from that audience). Once you factor in vandalism, there really is no way to use wikipedia (or most of the internet, for that matter) in that enviroment as things stand today. The problem is, of course, for any sufficiently interesting subject there will be people that any rational policy will drive away. This is largely because humans are generally not entire rational about at least a few subjects. We may only achieve the attention of some of that audience by reducing our level of rationality... which will ultimately cost us another audience. If our goal is to have the widest audience *today* then we are taking the wrong approach. I like to think that we are trying to maximize the value of the resource over the longterm... It is very easy for those that care to create censored subsets of the wikipedia. It is not easy to find censored wikipedia articles that don't exist. I never studied the image so closely. :) But you make a point, ... It would not be censorship to replace the image with one that conveyed the same information but better met some aesthetic goals. I wouldn't be qualified to produce that particular demonstration myself without risking a back injury. ;) I suppose could probably find someone who could, however.. It would be best if we could maximize the clinical appearance of such an image. I would not be the best person to make such suggestions, because I'm not bothered by it at all.... your suggestion of 'soft colors' would not be my first guess on how to achieve this goal. I didn't reply to the examples because I thought all of them were unreasonable. ... I really do believe that setting such a line should be avoided, and I am really arguing that doing so would be a serious mistake. Here is where we really would probably end up agreeing to disagree. I would be surprised if I were every offended by a chunk of factual information, I might object to what it represents as I object to the Holocaust but I would not find images of the mutilation of humans that happened during the holocaust objectionable. I would not find images of child rape offensive, although I really doubt they would be useful in an article on the subject, and.. Of course, I would never allow such an act to actually be committed if I had the power to stop it. I might find information in the form of a call to action (for example, hate speech) objectionable, because it forms instructions (directly or indirectly) to be carried out, rather than just conveying facts. Because of the principal of neutrality and the nature of editing on wikipedia, I think that it's highly unlikely that I would encounter such content.... and if I did, I would be uniquely empowered to address the problem. :) The difference is that true factual information is what it is... If we erase the evidence of it, we do not make it nonexistent. I don't believe that information of that type can be bad. Information that attempts to sway people to commit a bad action is the only type of information that I think can be 'bad' (because it isn't inert), and even in that case, outright censorship is often not the best means to prevent harm. Since I don't find the information we're discussing to be bad (because it's just inert information), I do not believe that it would be rational to exclude it on the basis of being offensive. (excluding it because we can find better material to use on the same topic is another matter entirely). I am unsure how many people share my position. I live with someone (who is actually a pretty active contributing editor, unlike me.. I've only edited a few things) who mostly shares my position on the matter of information being 'bad', but I don't have any reason to believe that she is any more normal than I am. Even if my position isn't common, I think it is a useful position to study the subject from... if not the only potentially valid position. If we decide that the image isn't the best image to convey the subject and it should probably be replaced with a similar image, then the intuitive course of action is to mark it as such, and leave it there. ... If we've agreed that something is informative (and encyclopedic) but needs improvement our practice has been to not delete it... The bad version serves as an incentive for people to replace it with a good version, and as an example of what we are trying to improve. Right, thats acceptable... If we keep the same educational value, it isn't at all censorship to find content that matches other more complex values... For example, it would be probably reasonable to replace a picture of a "mustang" car on the article about that with another equally good picture of a mustang that has a body color that better matches the color scheme of wikipedia.... :) I'm not sure if this is the case or not.. I think if you go over my points at the top we will improve our mutual understanding on this matter. [[Cognitive dissonance]] Explains the concept better than I can. ... I am basically saying that you are giving me too ideas which I would like to believe but I find them to be conflicting. .. I'm not sure if you are talking about excluding the people who will not use the wikipedia because they are offended by some of it's content... or my suggestion that we exclude people who want to operate under differing rules. Both are possible, so I will answer both. I don't think it's our goal to include all possible readers, because all possible readers are not rational and "you can not please all of the people all of the time". I can't be faulted for excluding all these people because we exclude many people just because we refuse to include "France is a bunch of cowards". ;) In case of excluding editors... It is normal to ask people who do not wish to follow the rules of the game to go start their own game elsewhere. Forks are not usually good, but they can be liberating. I'd welcome anyones contributions, but if people insist on removing the valuable contributions of others, I don't think it is censorship to ask them to go remove things elsewhere. That is very true. I think we are all guilty of making things more simple than they strictly are, but I don't know that communication is possible without simplification. You have not offended me in the least, and I'm glad we've come to a greater understanding. Equally, I do not wish to offend you.