[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Keegan Peterzell]

I didn't participate in the referendum.  I understood from the beginning
that this was going to be implimented, the matter of community opinion is
nice to ask for but didn't really matter, and ultimately the only thing that
comes of this is help answering Islamic users questioning us showing
depictions of Mohammed.

The conversation in this thread has been engaging in helping me decide my
opinion on a personal level: I'll go with the filter as responsible concept.

Milos, you state that Americans see everything involving nudity under the
label as porn and offensive, and filtering with that mindset is a bad idea.
 You're correct about Americans acting that way in general.  I could pull a
juvenile prank and replace someone's computer background with the image of a
penis, and it will be called porn.  It's not, it's an image of a penis, but
that's the feeling we evoke.

We're growing and developing in Islamic countries and countries with a high
percentage of Islamic population.  A highly held principle is not seeing,
publishing, or distributing depictions of Mohammed.  This is a deeply felt
belief, one which makes any claims to offending morals seem trivial.  We had
a massive problem at the Arabic Wikipedia over providing content that
depicted Mohammed. From our standpoint in customer relations on OTRS and on
Wikimedia projects in general, we could do little but provide information on
how the hide all images with the disclaimer of NOTCENSORED, NPOV, you should
be more cultured than to believe that's actually what Mohammed looked
like/be more open minded...the list goes on.

Now, when we choose to point to cultural trends as a reason something is
bad, the argument will die.  If you inform most of the Western readers that
you are offended by images of Mohammed, at some point someone will have the
same reaction that happens when talking about Americans and sexual images.
 Americans might have the same argument used against them with Muslems.  The
point is that we have to respect cultural norms and see why they are what
they are.  We can disagree, but the first step for globalization is the
ability to say "Oh, I see where you're coming from."

What is fundamentally ingrained in a culture is part of the root of that
culture.  We're global, but culture is not.  Which leads to...

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 2:58 AM, Fajro <faigos at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can anyone explain me how this Image Filter is not against the mission
> of the Wikimedia Foundation?
>
> Letting some users to block Wikipedia content is NOT a good way to
> "disseminate it effectively and globally" as stated in the mission
> statement.
>
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement
>
>
> --
> Fajro
>

I fundamentally disagree.  If the content can be managed to be culturally
sound, that is effective to disseminate globally.  If Islamic countries do
not want to see images of Mohammed, that is effect in maintaining other
content without blocking the site.  Same applies to other religious imagery,
political imagery, sexual imagery, and whatever else.  The filter is for
images, and while pictures are louder than words, we can at least have the
words while maintaining cultural integrity.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan