Exactly this.
If the government of any given country wants to redirect certain articles, or all of Wikipedia, to a page saying "This content blocked by the Ministry of Knowledge", people will know they're being censored. If instead they reach a "sanitized" version of the article reflecting the government's preferred spin, we're putting that government's spin in our voice. That's not at all acceptable.
Let them censor, let them make it obvious, and let them deal with the fallout. But we should absolutely not help them in any way whatsoever.
On Tue, Mar 4, 2014 at 9:30 PM, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
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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