Rob wrote:
On 1/30/07, Marc Riddell
<michaeldavid86(a)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 "incivility". 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 "offensive".
If a particular word or phrase offends you hit delete and move on.
While I am a passionate advocate for free speech in the public sphere,
Wikipedia is a private space dedicated to a specific goal.
And in fact the right answer here is not even to concede that
Wikipedia isn't free or is censored, but rather, to observe that
offensiveness is largely orthogonal to word usage. We do care
about offensiveness; we don't generally care about specific words.
I can say the mere words "God damn", "fuck", and "cunt"
here
(or on a talk page) with little fear of being censured or banned.
But if I were to say that Rob's mother is a deity-forsaken
substance-abusing prostitute who regularly has carnal knowledge
of sailors, winos, and goats, that's a horribly offensive thing
to say regardless of the words I couch the statement in.
If someone gets banned for being offensive, they're banned for
being offensive, not for using certain words. (But with that
said, and although I just said the issues are orthogonal, for
many people, and in particular for the people who are regularly
horribly offensive and who do deserve censure, the two are of
course pretty highly correlated.)
Wikipedia's freedom of speech is just about like Usenet's: you
can say (post) anything you can get away with. (But that doesn't
mean you can get away with anything and everything. And it's an
imperfect policy, for one thing because different people are able
to get away with different things. But like it or not, that's
about the way it is right now.)
I have no problem with the use of spicy epithets on the mailing list,
and would see no reason to be like television and ban the "seven
words". Where I object is with the use of terms as a clear personal
attack on someone, but I would still give a person time to cool off
before making a big fuss about it.
The occasional use of spicy language as emphasis can create an impact,
but when it's taken to excess such practice is counter-productive.
Ec