[WikiEN-l] Re: prudishness and censorship

Tue Apr 19 22:57:47 UTC 2005

Tony wrote:
>Could we drop this really very silly fig-leaf?  What we do on
>Wikipedia is censorhip--it's unavoidable, part and parcel of what we
>do in producing an encyclopedia.  When we decide what should and
>should not belong to Wikipedia, we're censoring Wikipedia.  It's
>censorship, and there's no big deal about it.  Why this huge, tiresome
>monstrous effort to find another name for it?

I think you're devaluating the term "censorship". You have not responded to my observation that internal control of content is not strictly "censorship", and this is definitely not a figleaf (or a coloured block, for that matter :-).

We actually control content all the time, through the means of VfD. Apart from hard-boiled trolls, nobody has ever applied the term of "censorship" to the VfD process.

To reiterate my view: Wikipedia aims to produce an encyclopedia for the widest possible readership. This readership is reduced if it attains a reputation for containing inappropriate images. My employer's web access blocking tool already blocks out Wikipedia.

JFW

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