[WikiEN-l] RE: Corrected

Fri May 13 07:48:41 UTC 2005

Stan Shebs wrote:

> What do you mean, "vigilantism"? We just don't need to tiptoe around
> scared that one mistake by some anon editor will force us to shut
> down. We're not some kind of dubious dotcom with a shady biz model,
> we're as open and truthful as we know how, we're dedicated to facts
> more than agendas, and best of all, we're giving away stuff for free.

All issues of activism aside, something like this might be needed anyway 
in order to prevent future editors from re-adding "forbidden" content. 
Wikipedia is editable by everyone, so if we need to direct our editors 
not to do something that means we have to make those directions known to 
everyone.

I don't know if they still do it, but back when Google was first forced 
to remove certain sites from the results one gets when searching for 
certain terms, they did so by replacing those results with links to the 
takedown notice that had forced them to do so. Since the takedown notice 
named the "forbidden" URL it just added an extra step to the process of 
finding those pages. If Wikipedia winds up having material forced off of 
it, rather than trumpeting the fact and raising a ruckus how about just 
replacing the pages or images in question with the takedown notice? That 
way it's only presented to people who are looking for that specific 
information.