[Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> But more generally, yes I suppose I may be overstating. Studying
> religious views on sex and pornography is interesting, because those
> views align closely with the laws and norms of wider society. Unlike
> wider society, religious conservatives can give a detailed, consistent
> and complete justification for their views.

And one which inevitably has apparently unresolvable conflicts with
one of our core organizing principles, NPOV.

Hundreds of millions of viewers a month visit Wikipedia, many of them
religious conservatives.  But our structure is not one that produces
articles on sexuality or religion (and sometimes on politics, and
science...) that are found to be acceptable by, at least, the most
hard-line among them.

Even the most widely acceptable initiative must eventually accept that
it can't please everyone. This is probably just one of the limits of
our model, and it's OKAY to have limits, everything does.

Consider, for a moment, the ALA list of most frequently challenged books:
http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/21stcenturychallenged/2009/index.cfm

I would propose that the reason we are subject to such a _small_
amount of complaint about our content is that much of the world
understands that what Wikipedia does is —in a sense— deeply subversive
and not at all compatible with "ideas which must be suppressed".  This
fact gets a lot of names, some call it a "liberal bias" though I don't
think that is quite accurate.  But there very much is a bias— a
pro-flow-of-information bias.  We don't always realize we have it, but
I don't think we deny it when we do.

Jimmy brought this up in his keynote at Wikiconference New York in
2009: http://www.archive.org/download/NYwikiconf_wales_keynote_25july2009/NYwikiconf_wales_keynote_25july2009.ogv


There are other resources which address these subject areas in a
manner which religious conservatives may find more acceptable, such as
conservapedia.  It is a beneficial that there are alternative
information sources, no one wants a world where all reference works
are Wikipedia, so to the extent that our inability to cover some areas
to some people's satisfaction creates more room for alternatives it is
a good thing.

I'd like to address an idea that underlies a lot of this discussion
which I think is patently ridiculous:   That our inability to please
_everyone_ on _all_ articles is actually something to worry about.
It's not something that can actually be done, all we can hope to
choose is decide who we'll please, and by our core principles it
appears that we've chosen to error towards the libertarians.  In terms
of overall popularity we would have better off not to, but then again
I doubt we could have built something so useful another way. There is
no existence proof yet, at least.


The internet is chock full of things that hard-line religious
conservatives would believe imperil the soul of anyone who views it.
Even the most aggressive government censorship short of a total
internet ban only suppresses are relatively small amount of this
material. ... and yet people with these concerns continue to use the
internet happily and productively.  The impossibility of total
censorship means that "don't look if you don't like" is a reality for
everyone and not just libertarians.

(English) Wikipedia stopped being "an encyclopedia" about 3 million
articles ago. Today it is a collection of specialist encyclopaedias,
or really— a federation of 3.2 million separate articles sharing a
common set of principles and other infrastructure.  It is expected and
acceptable that some people may strongly approve some parts and
strongly oppose others.

Wikipedia, in the aggregate, is an excellent resource even for the
staunchest religious conservative.  But due to our core principles,
some parts of Wikipedia will _never_ be acceptable to that audience.
In at least a few cases, no amount of careful handling can satisfy a
hard "factional information which must be suppressed to protect your
soul" at the same time as fulfilling the effective direction from NPOV
to factually express all major viewpoints.

As with any of our other limitations— I would recommend that people
find other resources that meet their needs when Wikipedia doesn't,
just as do for millions of other webpages.