[WikiEN-l] FW: Advisories and saying goodbye -- long

[Toby Bartels]

Julie Kemp wrote:

>The entire conversation has been not-very-subtly changed to be one over
>filters and wikipedia-imposed censorship.  It's one that I consider to
>be total bullshit, by the way -- well-calculated deviation that blurs
>any dealing with any type of deeper social responsibility.

Are you alleging that the opponents of the content disclaimer
changed the topic to filters in order to destroy the content disclaimer?
This seems untenable, for several reasons:
* Opponents of the disclaimer also tend to oppose the filters,
  yet now we may get both.
* There are quite a few people legitimately supporting the filters.
* Discussion on the content disclaimer has continued
  at [[Wikipedia talk:Content disclaimer]].  This has diminished lately,
  but discussion of something else on the mailing list didn't cause that.
* A content disclaimer now exists at [[Wikipedia:Content disclaimer]].
  Current debate is focussed on how broadly to advertise it,
  not much any more on whether it should exist at all.

>Some of you
>have managed to prove that Thatcherism is not dead (you know, the nice
>lady who said "there is no such thing as 'society'"?).  Nor is the
>ridiculous world of Ayn Rand, where one can pretend that one's actions
>have no wider consequences than those other people allow them to have.
>How utterly depressing that so many people who consider it important to
>write very good articles that raise awareness of the global
>interconnections of scientific, political, and religious issues (among
>others) refuse to accept that their own actions (or refusal to act)
>might also have widespread effects.

Allow me to be as insulted as Rand's fans
that you've compared her position to mine --
for directly opposite reasons. ^_^
More broadly, I'd like to remind everybody
of the existence of left-wing libertarianism.
Despite the rhetoric of (say) the US Republican Party,
the right wing has no monopoly on freedom.

>Oh -- and BTW, if we stuck to "wikipedia is not a dictionary", most of
>the articles that make a lot of wikipedians squeamish would be deleted
>anyway -- my guess is that no one wants to be seen as less than
>open-minded.  Felching is certainly a dictionary-type definition.

[[Felching]] should be folded into [[List of unusual sex practices]].
I haven't done this myself yet to avoid conflating different issues;
this one belongs primarily to the debate on ideal article length.
But isn't it interesting that the primary example of discussion
has been subtly changed from [[Fisting]] (a lengthy article)
to [[Felching]] (a tiny stub)?

>Anyway, as I say below, I'll check the list until my requests below are
>answered.  Thanks and peace.

I don't know if you're still reading the list,
so I'm copying this reply to your email address.
But it is on <wikiEN-l>, if you want to reply there.

Julie Kemp earlier wrote to Jimmy Wales:

>I really believe that NPOV is vital to the Wikipedia.  I really believe
>that censorship is antithetical to the project.  BUT -- that doesn't
>mean I don't think that we should use those principles to abdicate our
>responsibilities to a larger society.  It's all good is a nice phrase,
>but it isn't exactly true.  Some things aren't good.  And sometimes
>giving things that aren't good more 'airtime' than they deserve helps to
>inure people and even, I think, encourages a tacit acceptance that this
>is all part of society.

They are, of course, all part of society.
That doesn't make them all good.
But should Wikipedia take a position on what's good?
You have your opinions and I have mine, but they differ
(at least as regards children reading about sex),
but the point of NPOV is that Wikipedia should avoid deciding.

Certainly Wikipedia must not say in any article
«This is not good.» -- and you're not advocating that --
but further Wikipedia should avoid giving that impression
by the topics that it chooses to cover, and how it covers them.
This means that we cover ideas to different degrees
according to neutral criteria, such as
how interested Wikipedia editors are in writing about them
and how widespread a practice or belief is in society.
Irrelevant is how /good/ Wikipedia editors think that something is,
or how /accepted/ a practice or belief is in society.

We even have a natural way to balance these criteria when they conflict.
For example, some Wikipedia editors wanted to write about
certain unusual sex practices, but these aren't widespread.
Thus we don't give much space to these on [[Human sexual behavior]],
and none at all on the more general article [[Sex]].
But we do link to articles on these topics from [[Human sexual behavior]],
so that people can write about them without giving them too much emphasis.
We do similar things outside of the sex area of Wikipedia too.

As for disclaimers on these pages themselves,
they should all begin along the lines of
"'''Xxx''' is a [[sexual behaviour]] involving ...".
Then the reader is warned right away that they're reading about sex,
and they can choose to stop reading just as they might
upon seeing a disclaimer about sexual behaviour.
After all, beginning the article
"''[[Wikipedia:Content disclaimer|Disclaimer]]:
"This article discusses [[human sexual behavior]]
"and thus may be inappropriate for certain readers.
"
"'''Xxx''' is a [[sexual behaviour]] involving ..."
is hardly going to be any additional help.
(Some of the articles may not begin with appropriate context.
If so, then such context should be added, not a boilerplate disclaimer.)

I'll reiterate at this point that I have no objection
to [[Wikipedia:Content disclaimer]] itself.
One might even fold it into [[Wikipedia:About]] if it fits there well.

>Me?  I'm just a leftwing democrat ancient and medieval historian.  Maybe
>it has something to do with having read all that stuff on the
>individual's place in and responsibility to society -- that "man is a
>being of the polis" stuff.  Maybe it's growing up in the "ask not what
>your country can do for you ...", Great Society world.  Maybe it's
>because I deal with young people daily, and have read and seen enough to
>know in my gut that children are *supposed* to be protected by adults
>(and not in the crazy Adam/Lir "de Mausian psychohistory" way) -- and
>that even when kids seem to be able to deal with things, it doesn't mean
>they really are.  There's lots of evidence to back that, despite what KQ
>and others would like us to believe.

I asked for this evidence on [[Wikipedia talk:Content disclaimer]],
but you never replied.  (Perhaps you stopped reading that talk page.)

>Anyway, I would appreciate it if you could also "erase" me from the
>site.  If you must leave things in, perhaps you could change me to a set
>of unrelated initials, or a number.

I would object to removing mention of Julie entirely from the site,
since she played a major role in many things, such as:
* Various standards for history articles;
* The development of banning policy; and
* The specific cases of banning HJ and DW.
Understanding how these issues developed would be difficult
without a way to refer to an influential individual.
But I have no objection to always referring to her as, say, "Professor XYZ".
We should certainly be able to do this for anybody
with no more work than it would take to remove them entirely.


-- Toby