[WikiEN-l] "I want to at least kill the responsible person."

[John Lee]

On Feb 17, 2008 4:26 PM, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> geni schrieb:
> > On 17/02/2008, Raphael Wegmann <raphael at psi.co.at> wrote:
> >> It wouldn't cost "us" that much, because those who care would
> >> do the job. Any yes, there is a benefit for "us", because there
> >> would be 1 billion people more likely to help us out.
> >
> > Perhaps but then they find out about this:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glamor_photography
>
> They can enable the "nudity" filter for this one.
>
> > Or the other elements of Islamic law:
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus
> >
> > Obviously this is stuff would be problematical under Saudi law:
> >
> > http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible
> >
>
> I don't know or care much about Saudi Arabia (merely 2% of Muslim
> population), but the Gospel shouldn't be problematic since
> it provides "guidance and light" according to the Qur'an (5:46).

To a Muslim it is offensive to say Jesus is God. It is offensive to
view images of inappropriately clothed people. Muslims in Indonesia
found the images in Playboy sufficiently offensive to riot over.
Muslims in Malaysia frown on the usage of Muslim terminology in a
non-Muslim context; the government has actually banned Malay-language
Christian publications for using Malay words meaning "Allah", "angel",
etc. There are a lot of things people find offensive; there are a lot
of things Muslims find offensive. We would need not only a way to
censor images, but a way to censor text, a way to censor audio (spoken
versions of our articles, for example) and possibly even a way to
censor video.

I have always been supportive of an opt-in censorship mechanism, and I
have advocated looking into it, but I don't think it's a priority -
our developers only have so much time on their hands. The fact that so
many things are offensive to so many people only makes it further
impractical for us at the moment. We would need to start tagging
everything offensive to everyone, and though I suppose you could argue
it might be better in the long run, I doubt this is a big enough issue
to run to the devs and say "Hey, we need a way to provide people with
a choice of censoring all media."

IMO, forking and/or producing separate editions would be a better
idea. Automating the production of a separate edition via opt-in
censorship mechanisms would be nice, but requires way too much work to
be feasible given the resources we have.

Johnleemk