[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia and "indecent" content

[Andrew Cates]

Thomas,

You have an uphill fight on this. Some of the worse deletion decisions
the community has made, have been from people claiming "censorship"
and getting massive popular support: I sometimes wonder if a majority
of wikipedia editors are still teenage (literally) rebels.

There is another lingering proposal which I think originally came from
Erik Moeller which is to tag content with an off/on switch on
child-safe, "potentially offensive" or similar. This was in response
to a complaint about us removing some gruesome holocaust images from
the Schools wikipedia.

The advantages would be an increased preparedness on the part of
schools to give access. The disadvantage would be a switch which many
people would not bother with and the usual fruitcakes would abuse. We
did look at whether the schools wikipedia and Wikipedia 1.0 could be
converged as projects if such a switch existed.

On balance there were other priorities.

Andrew/ BozMo

On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 8:15 AM, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> 2008/12/23 Thomas Larsen <larsen.thomas.h at gmail.com>:
>>
>>> I think we disagree over whether or not including indecent images in
>>> an encyclopedia constitutes good scholarship. (Yes, I do think the
>>> image is obscene, but that is irrelevant.) I argue no; you seem to
>>> argue yes; and we'll just have to agree to disagree.
>>
>>
>> "indecent" is also a matter of opinion. And equally orthogonal to
>> whether we should write about it, illustrating what on earth we're
>> talking about as we do pretty much every other encyclopedically
>> noteworthy image we talk about.
>>
>> That it's stupid, crass and distasteful does not mean it isn't of
>> encyclopedic noteworthiness - it's in far too many "worst album covers
>> of all time" lists for that.
>>
>> Encyclopedic noteworthiness has no relation, positive or negative, to
>> the concerns you're raising, so you're coming across as missing the
>> point.
>
> I, too, lament the shocking lack of illustrative material in our article
> on [[shock site]]s.
>
> -Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> WikiEN-l mailing list
> WikiEN-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit:
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
>