On 7/24/10 9:45 PM, Milos Rancic wrote: > In other words "cultural context" is usually just an > excuse for POV pushing of various kinds. > > Actually, I think the opposite is true. Right now we impose our arbitrary Western moral standards on the rest of the world, and because those standards are our own, they are transparent to us. For example, we are very sensitive to issues of privacy and child pornography, but not to issues of religious sensitivity or violence for example. I'm definitely a supporter of "no censorship" (I founded WikiProject Wikipedians Against Censorship), but I'm under no illusions that we don't have our own "cultural context". I also don't think offering users and/or projects the ability to implement filtering equals censorship. No one complains about Flickr or Google being "censored" just because they offer filtering. Frankly, we're already filtering content, even on en.wiki, but only according to a "default" Western/American POV. We use line drawings instead of photos in articles on sex positions. We toned down the explicitness of the image we used to illustrate Lolicon. We tend to avoid putting porn, swastikas, and photos of dead bodies on the Main Page. In our view, this is simple editorial judgement. But other cultures could view this as POV-pushing just as much as we view efforts to filter religiously-offensive imagery as POV-pushing. So let's not kid ourselves. We have our own cultural biases and standards (which is not necessarily a bad thing). We don't have to argue that the sky is falling just because people are asking that their own cultural standards be accommodated in some way. IMO, filtering technology (if implemented correctly) is actually a good thing for those of us who want to keep Wikipedia uncensored. By letting people adapt Wikipedia to their own particular uses, they don't have to impose their POV on the rest of us.
Ryan Kaldari _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
