How can reporting the law and the opinions of the people be considered something that should be subject to censorship? I know there is the European HR tradition of limiting free speech for specific reasons, but such censorship of legal opinions and legal arguments goes to the core of one's conception of a free and democratic society.
I think the french law is certainly far less restricting than the current censorship imposed on the french wiki. Typical subjects censored are everything around race, racialism, racism, nazism, fachism, holocause, judaism, racist insults, lepen...
However, censorship can also be more snicky
For example, Jos� Bove article is also censored. The reason given of the censorship (aside from censoring editors because they use the same nick than other contributors) is that adding too much of one side would unbalance the article. As a consequence, the solution chosen is not to put more of the minor side, but rather to remove some of the major side. Which is quite a interesting option toward success of a complete article. One has the right to add a fact only he is similarly himself add the other side.
I think the problem was solved this morning as someone created another Jos� Bov� article (called [[Jos� Bov�/NPOV]]). This article removed in particular the whole list of condemnations of Jos� Bov� by french law except one in 1998. In case some of you don't know, Jos� is currently in prison for his illegal (by french law) actions of destruction of gmo fields and mac donald.
However, indicating Jos� has been fined and is currently in prison is a POV statement and has clearly to be removed, as probably untrue.
I think it quite funny that previous contributors were censored as their additions were said liable by french law, and that now contributions are censored because they are reporting french law decisions.
Perhaps, the english article on Jos� Bov� could report the truth. Currently, it is a rather poor article.
completely agree this is shocking Anthere! Maybe there should be articles about these taboo French subjects on English pages. My French is good enough to translate into English, I am sure there are others who could help translate (even maybe getting it started with machine translation, that would be allowed under the open content license no? Perhaps you could put the banned French versions on English talk pages make a list called [[List of banned French pages translating into English]] and then we can built up the pages as people have time to translate them into English. Wouldn't it be o.k. to keep the French texts on the talk pages?
Interesting Most would be difficult to translate as not pages are usually censored, but part of the content. But, we could at least update the Bov� article I will think about that.
As far as the _very_ strict
puritanic tradition in the US, perhaps there should be a wiki server in Canada or some other country that is more liberal minded in some respects about allowing people to discuss and publish/broadcast "taboo" subjects.
Alex756
Interesting proposition. Especially since Canada is also speaking French. I note that no french canadian contributors has ever complained a contribution was liable by canadian law.
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo. http://search.yahoo.com