I think that if you stop to think about it another way, you'll find that this would do the opposite of what you intend, to wit: allowing "various courts" to impose editorial control.
Imagine Circletine, once a popular childhood beverage but now the issue of some controversy regarding its tendency to cause tooth loss. Although banned from sale in Europe and the United States, an aggressive marketing campaign has made it the best-selling soft drink in the nation of Elbonia. Equally aggressive lobbying in the Elbonian parliament has resulted it in being a crime to disparage Circletine in any way, or even to mention the controversy in print.
And so we have our article:
'''Circletine''' is a <bannedin country="elbonia">controversial</bannedin> milk flavoring product made from malt extract, curds, and whey, <bannedin country="elbonia">once</bannedin> extremely popular worldwide
<bannedin country="elbonia">Although it enjoyed several decades of success as an inexpensive beverage marketed mostly for children, concerns over an increased risk of tooth loss led to its withdrawal from sale in most western countries.</bannedin>
(I think you can see where this is going.)
Censorship is awful, but partial censorship is worse than simply saying "I'm not allowed to talk about it. Ask your government why."
Austin
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 9:50 PM, Yuri yuri@rawbw.com wrote:
I submitted the proposal to be able to eliminate certain parts of the articles in certain countries, where the local governments find those parts illegal: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62231 But it got rejected, and I am not sure I am clear why.
The problem is that there are countries that lack the freedom of speech (most of the countries), and some of them get very aggressive about banning materials that most reasonable people wouldn't find objectionable. The very recent example, provided in the bug report above, is banning of any references of Adolf Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" in Russia. While this case may seem not as important, but I don't see why users outside Russia should be affected by such decision, when they may not even support any decisions or values of the said government. Yet, everybody's version of wikipedia page is affected, and materials are hidden.
My suggestion, if implemented, would allow to hide certain parts of the articles in the country (or area) of jurisdiction of the corresponding court, while allowing users not living there to still see the original version.
If such governments get their way in banning materials globally, this will effectively make wikipedia biased, and reflecting various POVs of various courts, which has never been intended by wikipedia.
Yuri
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