[WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/27/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regardless of what you call it, the discussion has been held many
> times. There simply isn't anything near consensus for any sort of
> censorship in the community (and it is censorship, don't kid yourself,
> just read the first sentance in [[Censorship]]). The discussion has
> been had, lets just levae it at that.

First sentence of [[Censorship]]: "Censorship is the control of speech
and other forms of human expression, often by (but not limited to)
government intervention. " Certainly interesting, but doesn't have a
lot to do with this discussion, which is about tagging articles
"Nudity 3, Sexual themes 4".

If we've had serious discussions about that before, can you point us
to some examples? I would like to see the objections. Of course,
nothing stops us having the same discussion again.

> And frankly, while I agree that some sort of voluntary content control
> might be nice, I sorta like the idea that wikipedia will give you the
> facts straight up, without any spin, no matter how ugly or morally
> reprehensive they may be. Our responsibility is not to make a school
> safe version of the facts, our responsibility is to always give the
> facts with a neutral point of view. If some schools and libraries
> can't agree with that point of view, that's too bad.

Yes, it really is too bad. And I don't think your characterisation of
Wikipedia is quite correct. It doesn't always give a "facts straight
up" version, sometimes it gives a "facts with some bonus eye candy"
version, and sometimes they're not even facts.

Saying "if schools don't agree with the idea that their kids can be
looking at pictures of erect penises on an educational site, then too
bad" is, well, not helpful. We could do much better by making an
effort to avoid that happening, even while the rest of us enjoy our
erect penises (so to speak) to our heart's content.

Steve