[Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> Milos Rancic wrote:
>> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Sue Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Let me know if I'm missing anything important.
>>>
>> Actually, yes. In spite of multicultural nature of Wikimedia, this
>> process shouldn't be formulated as purely related to sexual content,
>> but as related to cultural taboos or to "offensive imagery" if we want
>> to use euphemism.
>>
>> Under the same category are:
>> * sexual content;
>> * images Muhammad;
>> * images of sacral places of many tribes;
>> * etc.
>>
>
> I'm sure you mean "sacred" instead of "sacral" :-) .

I've just went to Wikipedia [1] (accidentally, instead of Wiktionary)
to see the difference between "sacral" and "sacred" and I've seen that
those words are synonyms. Anyhow, it is good to know that "sacral" is
at leas ambiguous. ("Sacral" is a borrowed word in Serbian, too; and
Latin words make life easier to one native speaker of Serbian when he
speaks English [and some other languages] :) )

> We want to facilitate private decisions, not make them for people.

Agreed. My mail was partially self-contradictory. I've realized that
it is not so good idea to decide what shouldn't be seen by default
even though we could reasonably suppose that.

> Censoring by default puts us back in the same old conflict of having to
> decide what to censor.  Given a random 100 penis pictures we perhaps
> need to ask questions like what distinguishes penis picture #27 from
> penis picture #82.  The same could be asked about numerous photographs
> of national penises like the Washington Monument or Eiffel Tower.
...
> Voting is evil, particularly when it entrenches the tyranny of the majority.

People should be able to choose categories and to vote about them.

That part of proposal is not about denying to anyone to see something,
but to put defaults on what not logged in users could see. There
should be a [very] visible link, like on Google images search, which
would easily overwrite the default rules. Personal permission would
overwrite them, too. (If I was not clear up to now, "cultural
censorship" won't forbid to anyone to see anything. It would be just
*default*, which could be easily overwritten.)

The point is that "cultural censorship" should reflect dominant
position of one culture. My position is that we shouldn't define that
one of our goals is to enlighten anyone. We should build knowledge
repository and everyone should be free to use it. However, if some
culture is oppressive and not permissive, it is not up to us to
*actively* work on making that culture not oppressive and permissive.
The other issue is that I strongly believe that free and permissive
cultures are superior in comparison with other ones.

So, basically, if residents of Texas decide to censor all images of
Bay Area, including the Golden Gate Bridge, because they worry that
Bay Area values are transmissible via Internet (as they are), I don't
have anything against it. If more than 50% of Wikipedia users from
Texas think so, let it be. Other inhabitants of Texas would need just
to simply click on "I don't want to be censored" if they are not
logged in, or they could adjust their settings as they like if they
are logged in.

But, I would be, of course, completely fine if we implement censorship
just on [voluntary] personal basis and thus just for logged in users.
(As well as we don't implement censorship at all.)