[Foundation-l] Racism in Commons

Wed Mar 5 22:21:54 UTC 2008

On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 1:55 PM, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> What nobody has asked is whether these offensive cartoons on Commons are
>  used anywhere on any project and if so where. If any of them are not
>  used, they could be deleted.
>
>
>
>  On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 09:12:23PM +0100, teun spaans wrote:
>  > May I assume that you oppose the cartoons at the bottom of the gallery?
>  >
>  > It seems to me that the cartoons ridicule Sharon, not the Jewish people.
>  > Though I can imagine that you take offence to these cartoons, i doubt you
>  > can say they are racist, perhaps with the exception of the first, "Stop the
>  > Zionazi hero"
>  >
>  > kind regards,
>  > teun spaans
>  >
>  > On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 7:54 PM, Yoni Weiden <yonidebest at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >
>  > > Wikimedia officials, let this be known:
>  > >
>  > > As long as there are racist pictures and cartoons in articles of
>  > > personalities such as Ariel Sharon:
>  > > http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ariel_Sharon&oldid=9263178
>  > > The Hebrew Wikipedia community will boycott Commons and not link to pages
>  > > in
>  > > that project. We will not allow our readers to be exposed to such pictures
>  > > placed inapropriatly and insultingly.
>  > >
>  > > This is simply disgraceful. These racist and hate-encouraging pictures in
>  > > galleries as such is not what the Foundation intended, IMHO.
>  > >
>  > > Regards,
>  > > a concerned Hebrew Wikipedian
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>  > >
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>  --
>           Dr Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au
>         Post: 626 Melbourne Road, Spotswood, VIC 3015, Australia.
>                              Phone 03-93992847.
>
>
>
>
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A lot of unused images are on Commons, far as I know. I could
certainly see a use for these images in articles related to objections
to Israeli policy or Sharon in particular, so while I can understand
they may offend some people (and I'm sure their author was quite aware
they would), they have potential educational use, and are free
content, so offensive or not, they're appropriate for Commons. We can
have and use images without -agreeing- with what they depict, just
like we can write an article about Adolf Hitler without thinking the
man was good or right. As to categorization, they -do- relate to
Sharon. The category is not entitled "Pleasant, flattering images of
Ariel Sharon". Of course, if a specific project disagrees with the
decision, that's the beauty of open content-they're welcome to upload
only the images they want locally, make a gallery of them, and link to
that instead. That would be a very easy solution here that would
address the concerns of he.wikipedia without any need to alter
anything on Commons, so this seems to me more like a thinly-disguised
attempt to censor images Yoni finds distasteful.

-- 
Freedom is the right to say that 2+2=4. From this all else follows.