[Wikipedia-l] Restricted speech (was: Wikipedia teamwork and 501c3 status)

[Robert Bihlmeyer]

koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com writes:

> >There are plans afoot to spin off Nupedia and Wikipedia into a non-profit
> >organization.  This is by no means certain, [...]
> 
> [...] Even
> some of the comments on various /Talk pages might be enough to cause a
> challenge to the 501c3 tax exemption; [...]

In my mind, tax exemption is not the only reason for a non-profit
organisation. It's nice to have, of course.

But you're poking something that I've mulled over for some days: what
about, hmm, "restricted" speech in general?

Say that someone describes how Adobe e-books work so exactly, that it
is trivial for a programmer to circumvent the puny "encryption". Or
the same for DVD content protection. There are also classics like
descriptions of the production process of cocain or semtex[1].

I find all these interesting from a theoretical point of view. Normal
encyclopedias get by with not going into too much detail, but of
course WikiIsNotPaper, so if some more-or-less-anonymous contributor
created a neutral article, we have no such excuse.

On the other hand, Bomis, Jimbo, or whoever can be reasonably
connected with the site, would take some risk of prosecution. Is this
something we just accept? Should we censor ourselves? Our peers? Leave
it to the risk-takers to censor?


Footnotes: 
[1] BTW, I've now searched for all four terms, and found nothing
    concrete.

-- 
Robbe
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