[Foundation-l] Indian Minister Kapil Sibal doesn't like morphed images of colleagues

Tue Dec 6 21:21:30 UTC 2011

Unless I'm missing something, his examples "morphed photos of Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, as well as
pigs running through Islam's holy city of Mecca." sound like things that we
would not be using in Wikipedia articles, except if the morphed image had
gained sufficient notoriety that it merited an article, or at least a
section in the article on the magazine or cartoonist who'd created it.

Unless he casts his net wider I'm personally more concerned about the sort
of politicians who are prudish about nudity on the web and reluctant to
have information about evolution in the classrooms.

WSC

Message: 10
> Date: Tue, 6 Dec 2011 15:57:24 +0100
> From: Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Indian Minister Kapil Sibal Wants to Censor
>        social
> To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Message-ID: <20111206155724.A14225 at bruning.lan>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
> media.
> Reply-To:
>
> What to many appeared to be the abstractest of theory just
> a few months ago, is now becoming frightful reality :-(
>        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16044554
>
> Kapil Sibal's position seems to be pretty much exactly in
> line with our projected concept of image filtering (he
> practically literally uses the term), except he then
> extends the line all the way into censorship territory,
> without further scrupules.
>
> If we had already gone ahead with the image filter as
> projected, we would be snookered by the time Kapil
> Sibal called our Indian office folks to his office.
>
> With an image filter in place -pretty much exactly to
> Indian Government specification right off the shelf-  there
> would be no way to argue that such a thing was impossible,
> difficult, or unconscionable.
>
> We would have either been forced to censor some of our  WM
> projects "You don't have enough image taggers for commons?
> I'm sure we can provide some", or withdraw from India.
> Since full-on censorship is intolerable, we would have been
> forced to withdraw.
>
> Now we (still) have clean hands, and (with a bit of luck) can
> probably put down a strong(er) argument that can weather
> any Indian govt attacks on NPOV, should they come. If we
> are careful, we can likely do so politely and assertively,
> without hurting too many people's feelings.
>
> (Also: seeing reporting on facebook and twitter activity, and
> having viewed pages from eg. Hindi Wikipedia, I do not
> believe that the Indian internet community shares Kapil
> Sibal's position. Though they'll have to speak for
> themselves, of course! :-)
>
>