Re: [WikiEN-l] What's wrong with censorship?

On Tue, Mar 29, 2005 at 05:30:08PM -0500, Poor, Edmund W wrote: [snip] While I can understand both definitions of the word "censorship", I think it is far more useful to draw the distinction around the type of behavior that seeks to suppress ideas or deny points of view a public hearing, as opposed to that which simply refuses to support particular points of view. For instance, it would be absurd (it seems to me) to state that when I choose to buy novels by Neal Stephenson and not to buy novels by Stephen King that I am "censoring" King by not supporting his work, granting it space on my bookshelf, or recommending it to my friends. To define "censorship" this broadly makes the term meaningless. Censorship, it seems to me, needs to be defined in terms of a space of discourse, and an act of intrusion upon it. There have to be speakers who want to speak, listeners who want to listen, and an act which stifles the speech for the purpose of keeping it from being heard by those who would choose to hear. (Government schools are such a bad example, and so frequently cited, precisely because they come already politicized. They are supported with taxpayer funds which people do not have the choice to withhold; everyone is compelled to underwrite whatever the schools teach. That is why people get so agitated when government schools teach things they disapprove of -- not just because *someone* is teaching sex or religion or whatever, but because it's being done with *our money* and, in a republic, with the presumption of the "consent of the governed". When than consent has *not* really been given, people get indignant at the presumption. Wikipedia has none of those problems.) Wikipedia has a structural commitment to the idea that open public collaboration, with a focus on neutrality, can generate value and can approximate truth. Wherever this idea or its practice is forbidden, Wikipedia is by necessity subversive and illegal. There's no getting around that. If there is a regime under which NPOV is illegal because (let's say) all credit must be given to the Great Leader, then Wikipedia must either fail to propagate into that regime, or else defy the laws of that regime. It cannot propagate into that regime without either breaking the law or becoming anti-Wikipedia. Where the law says we must lie, we simply must not go unless we are willing to break the law. If we go there and follow the law by lying, then we have destroyed what we went there to build. What we have -is- a spade. It makes no sense to call a perfectly innocent spade by the name of a sword that has brought untold death and mutilation to the world. -- Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger(a)whoi.edu>