[WikiEN-l] Another "BADSITES" controversy

[Sheldon Rampton]

Jayjg wrote:

> Wow, what astounding rhetoric. "Censorship".

That's not rhetoric. It's precisely the right term to describe what  
you're trying to do. The Encyclopedia Brittanica defines censorship  
as the "act of changing or suppressing speech or writing that is  
considered subversive of the common good." Wikipedia defines it as  
"the removal and withholding of information from the public by a  
controlling group or body. Typically censorship is done by  
governments, religious groups, online communities or the mass media,  
although other forms of censorship exist." Both of those seem to me  
to aptly describe what you're trying to do.

Of course, it's not GOVERNMENT censorship. Rather, it's an attempt to  
ban a class of speech on Wikipedia via a policy. What makes it  
censorship is the supporters of BADSITES are attempting to create a  
whole class of forbidden-in-advance speech, arrogating unto  
themselves the right to determine what information other people can  
include when editing Wikipedia in the future. Does someone want to  
link to something on WR so they can comment on its errors? Do they  
want to link to it on a talk page because they think it actually has  
made a valid point about something? What if WR actually DOES make a  
valid point about something? If we have a policy against ever linking  
to WR, none of those questions matter. Individual Wikipedians have to  
surrender to the policy, regardless of context, circumstances and  
their individual judgment as to appropriateness. That's what makes it  
censorship, in the same way that it would be censorship to say that  
no one can ever post an image of a nude body part or a swastika or  
some other thing that someone finds offensive.

Maybe the following example will clarify my point further: I would  
fully agree with someone's editorial insistence that we shouldn't  
have an image of a swastika in an article about the Catholic Church.  
By supporting this position, I'm not engaging in censorship. I'm  
simply making an editorial judgment that a swastika is inappropriate  
for inclusion in an article about the Catholic Church. However, I  
WOULD consider it appropriate to include an image of a swastika in an  
article about Nazis. In other words, I think the question of whether  
a swastika belongs in an article should be left up to sensible  
editors who make their judgments based on context and  
appropriateness, NOT on some policy imposed by someone who thinks  
they have the right to forbid anyone else from ever doing it under  
any circumstances whatsoever. See the difference? What Jayjg wants to  
do is forbid anyone else from ever posting a link to WR anywhere on  
Wikipedia under any circumstances whatsoever. That's censorship.

I should also note that the supporters of BADSITES are really  
attempting to censor a very specific type of information, while  
dressing up this specific goal under generalities to make it sound  
like something that would be a appropriate as a "policy." What they  
really want to do is specifically ban all links to WR, but this is  
being dressed up as a policy against "linking to attack sites." If  
they simply wanted to ban links to WR, I would actually have less  
problem with it. Such a policy would be a mistake, in my view, but it  
is less open-ended and therefore less likely to be abused than  
generalizing out from WR to some broader, vaguely-defined category  
such as "attack sites."

This whole discussion reminds me a bit of a debate that happened at  
the University of Wisconsin-Madison a decade or so ago, when some  
well-meaning opponents of pornography tried to get the concession  
stand at the UW student center to stop selling Penthouse and Playboy  
magazines. Some university bureaucrat briefly attempted to impose a  
Solomonic solution by forbidding the student center from selling  
monthly magazines. The idea was that weekly magazines like Time or  
Newsweek could still be sold. It would eliminate Penthouse and  
Playboy but wouldn't really be censorship, because the CONTENT of the  
magazines wasn't the reason given to ban them. This of course was  
nonsense. The late, great Erwin Knoll (then-editor of The  
Progressive, a monthly magazine published in Madison), wrote a  
humorous column suggesting that the university should just adopt a  
policy forbidding the sale of all magazines whose names begin with  
the letter "P." To do so, he argued, would be no more arbitrary and  
would still have the desired effect of eliminating Playboy and  
Penthouse (and also the Progressive) but would at least leave other  
monthly magazines unaffected.

In a similar vein, I would like to suggest that if Jayjg and Slim  
Virgin wish to find a policy-based way of banning links to Wikipedia  
Review, they should at least try to do so under the narrowest  
possible policy defining the thing they are trying to ban. A lot of  
rhetoric has been thrown around saying that Wikipedia Review is  
guilty of libel, harassment, stalking, even terrorism. Each of those  
acts, if indeed they have been committed, are real crimes. Someone  
who commits libel or stalking can be taken to court and convicted,  
fined, even jailed. If Wikipedia Review is committing those sorts of  
crimes, the victims can pursue legal remedies and get a court  
judgment so that we have a basis for common agreement that WR's  
actions do indeed reach the level of criminality that those terms  
imply. Once someone has won a court judgment showing that WR has  
engaged in illegal harassment, I would accept a policy saying that  
Wikipedia should ban all links to websites whose owners have been  
convicted of criminal harassment against Wikipedians.

If, on the other hand, you can't prove in a court of law that  
Wikipedia Review has actually done something illegal, you should just  
grow a thicker skin. As a very wise cop once told me, part of the  
price of living in a free society is that you sometimes have to  
tolerate unpleasant behavior by obnoxious individuals.

--------------------------------
|  Sheldon Rampton
|  Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (www.prwatch.org)
|  Author of books including:
|     Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
|     Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
|     Mad Cow USA
|     Trust Us, We're Experts
|     Weapons of Mass Deception
|     Banana Republicans
|     The Best War Ever
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