[Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters

[Andreas Kolbe]

I do think that one needs to have spent some time in Germany to understand that 
things *are* different there. Nudity is no big deal. To give some examples, municipal 
swimming pools may have times set aside for nude bathing. They may have mixed saunas, 
or changing rooms used by females, males, and children at the same time. Male and 
female full frontal nudity occurs on the covers of mainstream publications. No one bats an
eyelid.


At the same time, Germany has some of the most stringent online youth protection laws
when it comes to pornography, rather than nudity. Pornographic content on the internet is
legal only if technical measures prohibit minors from getting access to the object (AVS =
Age Verification System or Adult-Check-System). 

That's typically a credit card-based system. A similar system is used e.g. to prevent minors'
access to cigarette vending machines. (The reason this doesn't apply to us is that our 
servers are in the US, outside German jurisdiction.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-09-26/Opinion_essay#German_paradox:_some_of_the_most_stringent_youth_protection_laws_in_the_world.2C_combined_with_cultural_openness_to_nudity


So I never saw the vulva appearance on the de:WP main page as a significant problem,
when seen in the German cultural context. German kids look at images like that in school.

Andreas


--- On Fri, 30/9/11, Oliver Koslowski <o.nee at t-online.de> wrote:

From: Oliver Koslowski <o.nee at t-online.de>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Friday, 30 September, 2011, 16:02

Am 30.09.2011 16:46, schrieb Risker:
>> My question to you is why anyone would want to participate in a discussion
>> where their opinions are going to be classified by their sex or their
>> geographic location rather than their input.

There's absolutely no harm in coming to a finding that, say, 80% of the 
US-American female
contributors prefer the filter while only 30% of the non-US-American 
female contributors
do. Just like there is no harm in stating that 86% of the core 
contributors to de-WP do not
want to see the filter in their project.

It really depends on what you do with these numbers. If you use them and 
try to understand
why the two groups feel in such a drastically different way and how you 
wan to deal with that,
then there can't be anything wrong with that, can there?

You claim that Milos implied that "if you're a woman from the US, your 
opinion is invalid", and
I have not seen anything like that.  It strikes me as funny that you 
would complain about  his
post being aggressive and alienating when your post could be construed 
as exactly that.

Regards,
Oliver

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