[Foundation-l] and what if...

[George Herbert]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 4:08 PM, teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On the other hand: our mission is to spread knowledge in a free form. Under
>> a free license. I think it is NOT our task to combat censorship, or to
>> advocate free speech.
>
>
> In fact, restricting the content to only "free content" *is*
> self-censorship, in exactly the same way as restricting child pornography
> is.  There are both moral and legal reasons not to distribute copyright
> violations, just like there are both moral and legal reasons not to
> distribute child pornography.
>
> Yes, this requires determining what is and isn't "child pornography", just
> like it requires determining what is and isn't "free content".  But very
> little discussion of the former has taken place.

We see little that is borderline, because it's offensive enough that
there aren't many places that it's remotely appropriate in Wikipedia
(free speech / information aside).

We also are relatively good at following up on reports of illegal
activity on-wiki, so there's little motivation to actual criminals to
host actually criminal images here.

If you have some specific examples of there being a problem with
categorizing borderline content, please post them, but my
understanding is that both child porn and pedophilia are being
effectively and unambiguously identified and stomped on in the
infrequent instances that they appear.

If there are enough mistakes happening that it's a problem, that
should be talked about.  But I am not aware of any...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com