[Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

[Sydney Poore]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:

> >
> > 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.
>
> The end game for this strategy of giving every (sub-) culture their own
> subset of the images and/or text (when every medium agrees all at once),
> and where everyone lives past each other is actually well known and well
> studied:
>        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarization
>
> Due to my knowing the historical context, I would actually prefer that
> people were confronted by cultural differences and have a healthy
> dialogue about them, to prevent or mitigate pillarization.
>
> Then again, that's a deeply held cultural belief in the part of the
> world that I live in, and you might not share it. ;-)
>
> sincerely,
>         Kim Bruning
>

Besides your acknowledged bias towards confronting people with their bias
and forcing a discussion, it is also not very practical that we be the host
for discussions on talk pages continuously with large groups of people. It
fatigues our established users when discussions are repeated continuously on
article talk pages. Sometimes it is needed to address content decisions. But
comments are frequently not responded to in a timely manner perhaps leaving
people feeling that no one cares about their views.

And lots of people want to look up information or edit an interesting topic
without having a consciousness raising discussion. There are many
opportunities for people to interact and learn from each other without us
placing them in a position where they feel like they need to do it or stay
away.

So, I don't think that pushing people to see material that they are not
comfortable seeing is necessarily beneficial to WMF projects or the person.


Sydney Poore
User:FloNight