[Foundation-l] Racism in Commons

[Wily D]

On Dec 5, 2007 1:09 PM, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Dec 5, 2007 6:56 PM, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:
> > Yoni Weiden wrote:
> >
> > >Regarding double standard - I have no idea whats going on in other pages. I
> > >can imagine that this artist and others have infected other pages too,
> > >incl.
> > >Bush's page, and even Hitler's page. These pages should be *clean* from
> > >racist images that promote nothing Wikimedia stands for.
> >
> > Like Wikipedia, Commons is not censored. I have an account there - albeit
> > only with a handful of uploads, but I *will* vote oppose on any deletion or
> > policy that seeks to impose political correctness on a media repository. I
> > *hate* censorship and do *not* believe it should be selectively applied to
> > people I disagree with or hold opposing beliefs to.
> >
> >
> > Brian McNeil
> >
> >
> I fully agree. We should never delete images on moral grounds or
> political correctness. Unfortunately we have done so in the past.
>
> Bryan
>
>
I'm not sure it's necessary to repeat this, but it's an important point.

Commons needs racist images - we need to illustrate [[Racism]],
[[Anti-semitism]], [[White supremism]] and a host of other articles on
Wikipedia, and presumably comparable usages in related projects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Races_and_skulls.png <- This
incredibly racist image is used to great encyclopaedic effect here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:MaziyarBizhani.jpg This
anti-semetic image is invaluable to this encyclopaedic article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Holocaust_Cartoon_Competition

Trying to hold single, contextless images to a NPOV standard would be
ruinious to commons and Wikimedia projects as a whole.  The manner of
displying images on commons may be a seperate issue, I don't know.
Usual problems with everything being public, I guess.

WilyD