[Wikipedia-l] censorship

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 01:12:27 -0800 (PST), Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I think you are confusing censorship and neutrality

I don't think I am...
 
> If we were claiming autofellatio is not possible, we would be incorrect.

Right, which is a reason why the image is useful.... It says that it
is possible in a manner which is difficult for text or drawings to do
alone.

> If we were saying autofellatio is bad, we would be non-neutral.
> If we were deleting the autofellatio article and pretending it does not exist, it would be censorship.

If we delete an informative part of the article because we think that
autofellatio is bad, or because we think that images of
nudity/sexuality are bad, it would be censorship *and* it would be
nonneutral because we are deciding content based on the same type of
value judgement you provided above.

At least, that is my position.

> If we display a picture of autofellatio in the autofellation article, it is possibly displaying offensive content, or possibly not.
> If we decide to use a drawing rather than the image in the autofellatio article, it is possibly admitting a taboo, or possibly not.

I think it's pretty obvious that some people are offended by the
image, for they think images of such things are bad just as some are
offended by the concept alone, and would like to see the whole  thing
deleted.

> If we display autofellatio image in user talk page, it is hurting people who do not expect to see such a picture on a talk page (while they can choose not to go to the autofellatio)
> If we do nothing to help those who spent hours cleaning up, it is lacking respect for other people time. It is unwikilove.

Right, I don't argue for keeping it in talk pages.... 
Do you think that this isn't known to the people spamming the talk
pages with this image?    There are many many more offensive images on
the internet, but they don't have a possible place on the wikipedia
because they are not informative about such a subject. It's quite
possible that the vandals motivate is to make a problem of the image
so that you will have it deleted because they are morally opposed to
it's availability.. And in that case, you are playing right into their
wishes.

We must consider the matters of censorship and vandalism as completely
separate matters, unless we wish to be forced to abandon our ideals
due to the agenda of anyone with a webbrowser and the time to
vandalize.

> Both neutrality and censorship are "strong guidelines".
[snip guidelines examples]
> 
> As for all guidelines applications, only editors have the authority to try to set rules to attempt to follow the guidelines.
> 
> On wikipedia, there is a strong desire to follow a couple of mandatory guidelines/principles, but there is an equally strong desire to let editors create themselves their own rules to try to fit the guidelines.

I contend that censorship is a matter of neutrality because it imposes
good/bad value judgements on articles.

What I'm reading here is that neutrality is negotiable.
I did not think this was the case.


> I think accepting that cultures have different taboos is right.
> 
> Calling other communities rules and opinions, when differing from yours, "non-neutral" is wrong. This is what you are doing. The decision of the english wikipedia is fine, but the rules applied on the english wikipedia, belongs to the english wikipedia. They should not impair the right of other communities to set their own rules, without those being called censorship.

I'm having a problem getting over the cognative dissonance here.
People have differing views of what is right and wrong, this is true
for people of the same culture or people of differing cultures. When
we attempt to modify the article to fit our views and exclude others,
this is non-neutral and this is censorship.

For what it's worth, as best I can tell, the image is quite offensive
to many people in the United States, ... This isn't a matter of it
being non-offensive to one group and not others.