[Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters

[Bishakha Datta]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 10:54 PM, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Bishakha, call it editorial-content, call it censorship or any other
> euphemism - at the heart of it, it is deciding what someone gets to see and
> what not.


Theo: they are different things, and given the premium on accuracy and
precision at wikipedia, I don't think we can claim that editorial judgments
and censorship are the same.


> It should not be our job to censor our own content.


We're not suggesting that as far as I know. Nothing is being removed from
the sites. [1]


> The strongest
> argument I read against this has been - it is not something WMF and the
> board should implement and develop, If there was a need to censor/cleanse
> graphic content, there would a successful mirror or a fork of the project
> already somewhere. Instead, we have small distributions/projects which use
> 1-2 year old offline dumps to cleanse and then consider safe.
>
> Now, If you were to apply this argument to a government, or a regime and
> they decide on removing things that make them flinch -
>
how different would
> we be from dictatorial regimes who limit/restrict access to Wikipedia for
> all the people that do flinch?


There is no proposal to remove anything from the sites; as I understand it,
it is proposed that users can click on a button to turn off some images -
those who want to continue to see everything can continue to do so. Nothing
goes.

But when the Indian government bans Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses or James
Lane's book on Shivaji, that is censorship.[2]

I can point to Indian I&B ministry issues or
> Film censor board of India, but you probably know more about them than me.
>
> Yes, I know from personal experience - had a huge brush with the Censor
Board in 2001 and refused to remove any content from my docu as demanded by
them. [3]

Cheers
Bishakha

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_India

[3]
http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/the-limits-of-freedom/the-secret-life-of-film-censorship.html