[Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Robert Rohde wrote:
> Personally, I tend to see ICRA labeling as just another kind of
> categorization, albeit one with definitions that were defined
> elsewhere.
>   
This is precisely and completely absolutely wrong.
Labeling is enabling censorship. Labeling images
is the worst kind of enablement of censorship, in
that it can effect the way a pages informational
content is presented to the viewer.

> If there are people in the community willing to sort content into the
> ICRA categories and maintain those associations, then I see no problem
> with Wikimedia supporting that.  Having images tagged with
> [[Category:ICRA Nudity-A (exposed breasts)]] is useful information for
> people that care about such things.  As with most other projects on
> Wikimedia, I think it mostly comes down to whether there is a
> community of volunteers who want to work on such issues.
>   
Not so. As an argumentum absurdum, let me offer the
following proposition:

"If there are people in the community willing to sort content
into categories depending on whether the content is suitable
reading material for Catholics (insert your own ideology,
religion, political affiliation, or other orientation here) and
maintain those associations, then I see no problem with
Wikimedia supporting that."

See the problem with your argument there? I am sure
there would be people who would care about such things.
But we just don't do that. And the same applies to ICRA.

It does not come down to whether there are enough hands
to do the work. It comes down to the fact that our *mission*
is to distribute the *whole* of human knowledge to every
human in their own language. Period, no ifs or buts.

> There are, by my rough count, ~75 tags in the current ICRA vocabulary.
>
> These cover nudity, sexuality, violence, bad language, drug use,
> weapons, gambling, and other "disturbing material".  In addition there
> are a number of meta tags to identify things like user-generated
> content, sites with advertising, and sites intended to be educational
> / news-oriented / religious, etc.
>   
We don't do censorship. Period.

> It appears we could choose to use tags in some categories, e.g.
> nudity/sexuality, even if we didn't use tags in other categories, e.g.
> violence.
>
> On balance I suspect that participating in such schemes is probably
> more helpful than harmful since it allows schools and other
> organizations that would do filtering anyway to block only selected
> content rather than blocking wide swathes of content or the entire
> site just to get at 0.01% of content that they fine intolerable.  It
> also provides the public relations benefits of showing we are
> concerned about such issues, without having to remove or block the
> content ourselves.
>   
The public relations effects would be devastating. There
is a reason Wikipedia was blocked in China. It was because
we would not help in stuff like this, just to appease the
Chinese government. We haven't buckled on this yet.
And we won't.

The worst possible argument imaginable is that they
would do that anyway. That is their option, but we
won't help them a red cunt hairs distance on their
way. (pardon my french)

> To be clear, I don't think we should be removing or blocking any
> content ourselves.  Wikimedia is designed for adults and that
> shouldn't change.  However, if there is a content filtering standard
> that some segment of the community wants to support, then I'm
> perfectly happy to see that happen.
>
>   
You know what. You may be happy to see it happen.
But this question has been put to the community
time and again. There have been scores of attempts
to vote labeling in. ICRA has been put to the vote
at least three times. Each time, no matter how people
have tried to dress their proposal as innocous, we
have rejected it resoundingly. No, not only resoundinly,
but angrily, furiously. We don't do censorship. Period.


Sorry about the length of the posting, but this
continues to be important, vital, to our community.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen