[Wikimedia-l] TVTropes deletes all pages with "Rape" in title under advertising pressure.

[Nathan]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi at gmx.net> wrote:

> * Nathan wrote:
> >It's simple. The WMF didn't do anything. The English Wikipedia did. That
> >project effectively changed the content of the entire encyclopedia for
> >political reasons. That is the condicio sine qua non for abandoning
> >neutrality. You might say it was done for great reasons, and that it
> >doesn't corrupt the principle of neutrality generally or imperil the
> >reputation of the project, etc. But it's impossible to rationally argue
> >that the SOPA/PIPA protest didn't temporarily set aside neutrality.
>
> "Neutrality" is an "article" concept, not a "project" concept and the
> protest did not change articles, it rendered them hard to access and
> different content was rendered in their stead, and that fact was very
> obvious. If the "project" was "neutral", in the sense the concept is
> defined for articles, it would be defined be how it is seen by others.
>

I disagree - I think it is a content concept. Content being what people
looking for encyclopedic content will find; just as people have often
argued against advertising on the grounds that it becomes non-neutral
content that questions the impartiality of the encyclopedia, the same is
even more obviously true if all articles are replaced with a political
banner. There is a degree of cognitive dissonance for people who believe
both in neutrality and in protesting SOPA/PIPA, which understandably leads
to tortured arguments like "neutrality is an article concept" and not a
content concept... but such arguments are plainly not true. Anyway, this is
most definitely a sidetrack from the topic of this thread.