[Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not censored (was Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Fri, 5/15/09, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not censored (was Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, May 15, 2009, 7:53 PM
> The argument against concealing or
> making it more difficult in any way
> to access material is that it inevitably amounts to
> censorship. In my
> youth, one could not receive publications--on any
> subject--through the
> mail from the Communist countries without signing a form
> that one had
> requested them; I remember doing this for photography
> magazines from
> Poland. For adult web sites today, one must click, and the
> click is
> recorded. Even though Wikipedia does not record views in
> an
> attributable manner, a log on the computer used to access
> it could do
> so.
> Further, a person looking at a sexual image now can say if
> challenged
> that it appeared by accident; if a setting had to be
> enabled, to see
> them, that wouldn't be possible.
> 
> 
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

That is true if the default is click-through.  An opt-in click through feature would not take the accidental argument away.  There is certainly a way to design such a feature to address the concerns you list.  I believe the real problem with such a feature is in content selection. There are always the boderline cases and who puts in the work to sort it out, someone will unhappy with the decisions (in both directions) and complaining about the management of it all.  And also the time delay factor, as things are being contstantly changed.  If we advertise that we have such a feature and people sign-up for it and it is only 80% effective, we may suffer more loss of goodwill then if we don't offer a "safe" option at all. Passively not meeting people's expectations is much better outcome than actively setting their expectaions to a certaiin level and then failing to meet them.

Birgitte SB