[Foundation-l] Discussion Questions for Potentially-Objectionable Content

[David Gerard]

On 25 July 2010 01:07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> This didn't save Encarta. They did this as a marketing move. They
> threw neutrality out the window as a marketing move [1]. That this is
> a blatant distortion was problematic enough that Britannica took them
> up on it [2]. I recall a discussion (I think it was on wikien-l) where
> Microsoft's blatant warping of knowledge for marketing reasons was
> discussed and laughed at, as aspiring to neutrality was obviously a
> better way to sum up the world's knowledge, without favour. Microsoft
> wanted to sell CDs, so had a strong motivation to slant away from
> uncomfortable facts; we aren't in that business.


Found it! It was wikipedia-l, March 2005:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-March/020575.html

Gates' argument was that "readers will get upset about content that
may fly in the face of their
reality."

Note that the word "reality" here seems to mean "personal POV."

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2005-March/020576.html
- Delirium points out the practical upshot of the horrific damage done
to NPOV by merely having multiple Wikipedias in the same language with
national bias. "I'd think we'd want people to be able to get globally
neutral information in their local language, not just the
locally-biased version."

(And I see I note in a followup a concurrent [2005] discussion on
wikien-l - where people are insisting Wikipedia cannot possibly
succeed unless it censors itself, for marketing reasons. The reasons
to censor seem to change with the seasons; the reasons not to censor
keep pointing to NPOV, which was there before Wikipedia existed, and
the mission.)


- d.