[Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people

[David Goodman]

I suspect the only answer you are going to get is that some people or
places would need it.  What you will not  get is any explanation for
why the WMF itself should do it. instead of letting those who want it,
to do it as they wish outside Wikipedia, as our licensing permits.
(You might get the reason that we can do it more gently, and perhaps
we could, but then it would hardly satisfy those who really want to
censor. Any one on the board who wants to pursue that route is free to
set up an organization to enable their own gentle value judgments)
If someone wants to make what amounts to a skin for whatever purposes,
there is nothing to stop them. We are right to have a license that
permits this,  even if 95% of us disapprove of their purposes. They
can use whatever they might want from the neutral tags we should be
applying in our categorization, or devise whatever of their own they
find appropriate for expressing their own values..

Our principles of freedom for the use of our material are so broad
they make no value judgments at all, and include even the freedom to
censor.



On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 05:21:23PM +0200, Milos Rancic wrote:
>> Board was aware of that, as the first Robert Harris' report included
>> very similar text from Canadian librarian association.
>
> I would then like to point out that there is no practical way to
> make a value-neutral categorisation scheme to use for filtering.
>
> You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either the scheme is
> neutral *or* it contains a value judgement so as to be usable for
> filtering. Logic holds that there is no middle ground here. Further
> any value judgement once made cannot be culturally neutral in
> practice.
>
> I'm going to assume in good faith that the board was not aware of this
> minor flaw. But I can't really stretch it much further.
>
> Could board members please chime in and elucidate?
>
> sincerely,
>        Kim Bruning
>
>
>
>
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
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