[Wikipedia-l] Censorship and bowdlerization

Wed Nov 13 17:22:43 UTC 2002

I'd like to point out that my original certification proposal would allow a
team to be formed to certify only articles deemed not to hurt certain
sensibilities. Anyone who shares these sensibilities could add the team to his
"trusted teams" list and decide to view only articles certified in this fashion.
(As any censorship expert will tell you, whitelists are the only effective
filters.)

While I'm against all types of censorship and consider it quite dangerous to
censor sexual information in an encyclopedia, if a government mandates the
use of such filters, this should be fought on the political and legal level,
and not within Wikipedia. If Saudi-Arabia wants its own Wikipedia, it's
probably better if they have one than if they have none at all.

The team proposal is much more neutral than any "tagging" feature. For
example, another team might as well decide to select only the most instructive
articles about sexual behavior etc. I would personally strongly oppose any
attempt to create an exclusionary filter specifically for one type of subject
("family filter" etc.). But the team proposal seems to have no disadvantages.

See
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2002-October/006816.html
and replies.

As for usernames, we might need a policy there eventually, I consider TMC to
be a borderline case. Individual RecentChanges filtering would also be
helpful, if just to exclude bots from being listed.

Instead of complaining about the lack any of this, you can help fix it on
wikitech-l.

Regards,

Erik

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