On 1/31/07, Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@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.