[WikiEN-l] How much?

Tue Jan 13 22:23:02 UTC 2004

On Tuesday 13 January 2004 03:09 pm, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> There is a legitimate question about how much human nudity should
> be shown in Wikipedia.

In your opinion this is a legitimate question. I don't consider it legitimate 
because I don't consider nudity offensive. (I have previously given the 
example that if puritans consider exposure to nudity a bad thing for 
children, they have to in the same vein consider a child looking at their own 
unclothed body as harmful. That position is patently ridiculous. (And a sad 
reflection on the influence of religious fundamentalists on societies the 
world over.)

> For acceptance, however, those of us with a "no holds barred"
> attitude might do well to consider the feelings of the "guardians
> of youth". This means, either leave stuff out of Wikipedia
> (unthinkable!) or somehow creating an expurgated (or bowdlerized)
> edition.

The first suggestion is untenable. The second suggestion will have a lot of 
followers. Sadly. If someone wants to provide a censored (and let's not mix 
words here, it truly is a censorship) version of wikipedia, they are free to 
do so under the GFDL. 

As far as I'm concerned, they can leave out whatever they want: No nudity, No 
criticism of religion, No blasphemy, No pictures of women (special feature 
for the fundamentalist islamicists), No mentioning of the word "God", No 
criticism of Israel/Saudi Arabia. No criticism of al-Qaida/Bush. No 
information on anti-terrorism measures (could help the terrorists, right?) No 
information on birth control. Human closed-mindedness literally has no 
bounds. 

What I do vigorously object to is doing something like this under the auspices 
of wikimedia. This means there should be no integration of a "censor" 
function in either wikipedia or in the wikipedia 1.0 effort. If such a 
project exists under the wikimedia umbrella, I will ask that none of my 
donation will in any way go towards this. I know that I (and everyone else) 
has donated with the full knowledge that wikimedia will do with the money 
what they/we see fit, and that the donators don't have any real say in the 
process. But I would consider it ethical to establish a seperate "censorpedia 
fund" (you're more than welcome to use that term ;-).

As an aside, I've been doing some research into the development of 
L'Encyclopédie (for wikipedia, of course). They too had tensions between 
those that wanted to censor information in order to have wider adoption, and 
those that believed that they should be able to publish information seen as 
offensive (or in the particular case of the Encyclopédie blasphemous) by 
portions of the population. Funny enough, they didn't seem to be as prude in 
regards to nudity as some of us are. I hope nobody is offended by the fact 
that they will see a penis in a picture from the Encyclopédie that I have 
added to [[anatomy]]. ;-)

Best,
Sascha Noyes

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