[WikiEN-l] Freedom of Speech in WP

[Andrew Gray]

On 30/01/07, 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.

The (conceptual) reasoning for a civility rule translates to:

"This is a collaborative project. Civility is needed in order to work
collaboratively with others. Not being civil rules out effective
collaboration; ruling out effective collaboration means you're not
working for the good of the project"

Basically, if someone doesn't play nice, they're not helping the
project - indeed, there's a good chance they're harming it, as a
combative and offensive attitude drives off contributors faster than
anything. And if they're not helping the project, well, please tell
them to bugger off. (in as many words...)

"Free speech" is a misnomer. Sure, free speech is limited on Wikipedia
by its groundrules - but we're virtually required to do so in order to
keep the project on track. We don't let you post lengthy theoretical
discussions of how you think you've proved the Riemann Hypothesis, for
example. You can think whatever you want, you can publish whatever you
want, you can say whatever you want. But we reserve the right to say
"no, not here", same as the New York Times reserves the right to say
"no, not in our pages".

If we're banning people over bad-word shibboleths - say, banned
because they talked about a "fucking annoying" problem* - we have an
issue, but the issue isn't "the policy is wrongheaded", the issue is
"people are applying it wrongheadedly". That's a misapplication of the
policy, which should deal with context and manifestations not with
specific terminology - and there is a world of difference between
"that might be construed as offensive" and "this person is being
offensive".

Common sense is a precious, precious thing. If people need to use it
more, please tell them...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

*a phrase I narrowly remembered to remove from a foundation-l email today...