[Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

Sun May 9 20:17:45 UTC 2010

David Goodman hett schreven:
> This is the first step towards censorship, and we should not take it.
>   
It's not. We already are censored right now. Jimbo, board and foundation 
have expressed that they do not accept the status quo (the status quo 
being that Commons is largely uncensored) and the "cleanup project" 
censored away our "surplus" of explicit material.

The tagging of images is a way to keep the status quo of being 
uncensored while also giving people the chance to filter content they 
deem inapropiate.

We have to balance between censorship applied by us and censorship 
applied by others. There is an interest in censorship and we can do 
nothing about it. It's a fact we have to accept. If schools don't want 
to see penises on their school computers we won't have success to 
convince them to allow penises. They will just block penises. If there's 
no way for them to tell apart "penis-containing pages" and 
"non-penis-containing pages" they may decide to block all Wikipedia 
pages. That's a bad outcome. If we provide good tags they may be able to 
tell them apart and they will only block the penises, not the other 
pages. Better than being blocked altogether.

The tags applied should be clear and fact-based. So instead of tagging a 
page as "containing pornography", which is entirely subjective, we 
should rather tag the page as "contains a depiction of an erect penis" 
or "contains a depiction of oral intercourse".

Marcus Buck
User:Slomox