[WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

[Stephen Bain]

On 1/31/07, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
>
> I bring this up because, when I first came to WP, the one policy I found
> most disturbing was the one concerning ³incivility². Most especially the
> practice of banning (punishing) members of the WP community for using words
> and phrases considered by whoever made up the policy to be ³offensive².
> This, to me, made WP free in every thing but speech.

You have precisely two rights as a Wikipedia user:

1. The right to vanish;
2. The right to fork.

There is no right to free speech on Wikipedia.

> If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.
>
> What are your thoughts and feelings about this?

Members of the community will tend to DefendEachOther [1] when they
are attacked. This is to be expected and encouraged. This explains why
there is opposition to people who are not civil towards others.

A good metric for whether a statement is offensive is whether the
statement offends anyone. If the community sees fit to defend itself
against a particular instance of incivility, so be it.

--
(1) http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?DefendEachOther

PS, before anyone mentions the First Amendment to the US Constitution,
please read and understand it. Wikipedia is not the United States
Congress.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com