On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:45:45 -0800, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
I totally agree with Andre here.
I think it's important for us to take a middle path here. (Big surprise coming from me, huh?) We can't be complete cultural relativists and say "anything goes in any wikipedia as long as the participants agree" -- this would be the end of neutrality. At the same time, we must not be complete cultural *imperialists* and assume that exactly identical decisions have to be made everywhere, particularly on sensitive matters that have a strong cultural component.
But is it imperialistic to say that one side of the issue does not have the right to completely exclude the other side with the only justification being that the one side believes they have a commandment from god to rid the world of such ideas?
Is it imperialism to ask that others not use the project to suppress the works of others to further their personal/cultural agenda?
Andre wrote:
A policy that says that we will exclude the same on all languages, says that we don't trust the Wikipedias to make their own choices.
I think that's very well said.
As I said in my reply to Andre, then why do we have rules at all? It is acceptable to set the ground rules, and ask those who do not wish to play by the rules to go start their own game... and I think that a tremendous rule that is baked into wikipedia is the idea of neutrality, a rule that is violated when we allow some editors to deny the ability of other editors to contribute useful information due to personally held ideas on goodness/evilness of the information rather than reasons not forbidden by our basic rules.
If we accept a group of authors in France erasing the works of other french wikipedia authors because the majority find the idea acceptable, then will we allow for the exclusion of evolution when the larger part of the US biblical literalists movement finally find wikipedia?