On 4/17/05, Tony Sidaway <minorityreport(a)bluebottle.com> wrote:
Faraaz Damji said:
> Not offending people should always be secondary to educating them.
It's entirely possible to do both. Say a person wants to learn about
autofellatio. They can read the article, and be educated. If they want
to then see a picture of it, they click a link. Easy. People are still
educated, and in this instance, they aren't offended. Furthermore, I
think it shows the inherent agenda in the extreme stance here - this
quote sums up perfectly how this removes choice from people,
"educating" them against their wishes. (and harming Wikipedia as a
result, when they stop using it)
Exactly. There's nothing wrong with tweaking a few tweakable noses,
especially those who raise purely personal objections, based on local
cultural sensitivities, to aspects of an encyclopedic project. Such
pressure is a naked and (because we're nice people and don't like to
offend, largely successful) attempt to distort the encyclopedia on
non-encyclopedic grounds. We can give a little but only where it doesn't
matter much.
Oh, come off it. The examples we're talking about aren't based on
entirely personal objections or local cultural sensitivities. The only
examples of those raised have been your red herrings. My nose is not
easily tweaked, but I'm not keen to see the work I do here go to waste
because less liberal people won't use the site.
This is my long-term objection to the path of
appeasement. The only thing
we can do in the long term is to remind people who are offended that they
don't have to download, let alone render, the pictures. We can't make
everybody happy.
But we can make most of the people happy, most of the time. And then,
in the case that some of the unlikely red herrings you've thrown up
over the last week actually come true, we say no. Problem solved.
-- ambi