[Wikipedia-l] censorship and guidelines

[Andre Engels]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 00:53:14 -0800 (PST), Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Then read again my initial message.
> I did not propose to censor the image; I indicated that unless a technical solution be found and implemented, the image will found itself naturally censored by all non english editors tired of seeing their main page or talk pages replaced by porn.

Maybe YOU should read your message again.

You wrote:

> So, I suggest that
> * either we all agree to share common images, since they can impact us
> and in this case, I would like that a common vote is held to decide the
> deletion of this image from the english wikipedia

You did not say that this would be a bad thing, you *suggested* it as
one way of resolving the issue. My dictionary (Concise Oxford
Dictionary of Current English, 9th edition) defines "suggest" as
"propose". So YES. You DID propose it.

> However, I think the Foundation hold a certain responsability on user talk page. If editors do not want their talk page to display porn images, it would be a good idea that we help this not to happen. I think that this is hurting our image. Incidently, I do think it would be a serious blow in our image that jimbo talk page be replaced by the picture of a man sucking his cock. It is hard to go negociate with outside people when so.

So we remove pictures of a man sucking his cock from all Wikis to
avoid that? Better remove editing of user talk pages too then. Because
it will be hard to negotiate if the page says spoken obscenities in
large font too.

> As I already said, you are entitled to your opinion.
> But an autofellatio image displayed in thousand of copies on editors talk page is NOT helping free knowledge.

Then again, a picture of a tree displayed in thousand of copies on
editors talk page is not helping free knowledge either. So should we
remove those too?

> Upsetting several wikipedias with many vandalised talk pages and telling them "guys, guys, please tolerate sex images on your talk pages for the sake of free knowledge. We decided for you this picture was okay on wikipedia" is not exactly the good move. Imho.

Who is saying we are to say they should tolerate it? Let them remove
it, just like other vandalism is removed. No reason to have them say
"Hey, you cannot have this image on your project because there are
places on our project where we don't want them!"

Andre Engels