On 9/28/07, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
" Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." - Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Adopted and proclaimed by General Assembly resolution 217 A (III) of 10 December 1948
Wikipedia is not a government-owned institution; it is privately-owned and thus the laws concerning private property apply. The WMF reserves the right to reject contributions as it sees fit; the only real rights you have under the model we operate from are the right to leave, and the right to fork. Everything else is pretty much a privilege granted by the owners of the servers which host Wikipedia. In short, there is no right to freedom of speech on Wikipedia, just as there is no right for you to hold an animal rights rally in my living room or in a shopping centre.
(was Re: The price of providing privacy and free speech)
Please take discussions of this sort to a mailing list where it is on-topic.
Hmm ... regarding "...discussions of this sort...", which I see as "Wikipedia policy towards anonymous contributions and contributors" or the use of http://tor.eff.org/ versus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_open_proxies, do you have a suggestion of a better place?
Personally I think we - Wikipedia - should stand up for Tor operators who get abused. We - Wikipedia - should at least understand the difference between our own policy against anonymous contributions or contributors on Wikipedia (a prohibition with which I disagree), versus totally unrelated features and benefits of Internet anonymity (though I think these issues are totally related to Wikipedia). Just because we may block anonymous contributions and contributors shouldn't mean we think anonymity itself is always bad or that we are neutral to it.
Wikipedia is not a social project, not a democracy, not a soapbox, etc. We are here to write a free encyclopaedia, nothing more and nothing less. We should not be advocating certain social ideals; even the GFDL is only a means to an end - that of ensuring the sum of human knowledge is available to everyone.
Johnleemk