[Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 4:22 PM, The Cunctator <cunctator at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hooray for letting American prurience and Larry Sanger's oddities shape the
> project.

Wikimedia's goal is to bring knowledge to everyone on Earth, not just
Europeans.  Europe is at the extreme left on the global social scale,
along with a handful of other developed nations.  Americans are more
socially conservative than Europeans, but still more liberal than most
of the world.  There are 1.5 billion Muslims on Earth, for instance,
which is more than America and Europe *combined* (although many of
those Muslims are European or American).  The large majority of
Muslims would find these images grossly offensive.  So would many
others from *really* conservative cultures.  Americans are the least
of the story.

The tolerance of sexual imagery on Wikimedia is a byproduct of Western
liberal provincialism.  Putting sensitivity to the cultural attitudes
of others above (thoroughly hypocritical) ideals of non-censorship is
essential to Wikimedia's long-term success, and I'm glad to see that
people are finally being forced to deal with this.