On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Tim Starling <[email protected]> wrote: [snip] > But more generally, yes I suppose I may be overstating. Studying > religious views on sex and pornography is interesting, because those > views align closely with the laws and norms of wider society. Unlike > wider society, religious conservatives can give a detailed, consistent > and complete justification for their views.
And one which inevitably has apparently unresolvable conflicts with one of our core organizing principles, NPOV. Hundreds of millions of viewers a month visit Wikipedia, many of them religious conservatives. But our structure is not one that produces articles on sexuality or religion (and sometimes on politics, and science...) that are found to be acceptable by, at least, the most hard-line among them. Even the most widely acceptable initiative must eventually accept that it can't please everyone. This is probably just one of the limits of our model, and it's OKAY to have limits, everything does. Consider, for a moment, the ALA list of most frequently challenged books: http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/21stcenturychallenged/2009/index.cfm I would propose that the reason we are subject to such a _small_ amount of complaint about our content is that much of the world understands that what Wikipedia does is —in a sense— deeply subversive and not at all compatible with "ideas which must be suppressed". This fact gets a lot of names, some call it a "liberal bias" though I don't think that is quite accurate. But there very much is a bias— a pro-flow-of-information bias. We don't always realize we have it, but I don't think we deny it when we do. Jimmy brought this up in his keynote at Wikiconference New York in 2009: http://www.archive.org/download/NYwikiconf_wales_keynote_25july2009/NYwikiconf_wales_keynote_25july2009.ogv There are other resources which address these subject areas in a manner which religious conservatives may find more acceptable, such as conservapedia. It is a beneficial that there are alternative information sources, no one wants a world where all reference works are Wikipedia, so to the extent that our inability to cover some areas to some people's satisfaction creates more room for alternatives it is a good thing. I'd like to address an idea that underlies a lot of this discussion which I think is patently ridiculous: That our inability to please _everyone_ on _all_ articles is actually something to worry about. It's not something that can actually be done, all we can hope to choose is decide who we'll please, and by our core principles it appears that we've chosen to error towards the libertarians. In terms of overall popularity we would have better off not to, but then again I doubt we could have built something so useful another way. There is no existence proof yet, at least. The internet is chock full of things that hard-line religious conservatives would believe imperil the soul of anyone who views it. Even the most aggressive government censorship short of a total internet ban only suppresses are relatively small amount of this material. ... and yet people with these concerns continue to use the internet happily and productively. The impossibility of total censorship means that "don't look if you don't like" is a reality for everyone and not just libertarians. (English) Wikipedia stopped being "an encyclopedia" about 3 million articles ago. Today it is a collection of specialist encyclopaedias, or really— a federation of 3.2 million separate articles sharing a common set of principles and other infrastructure. It is expected and acceptable that some people may strongly approve some parts and strongly oppose others. Wikipedia, in the aggregate, is an excellent resource even for the staunchest religious conservative. But due to our core principles, some parts of Wikipedia will _never_ be acceptable to that audience. In at least a few cases, no amount of careful handling can satisfy a hard "factional information which must be suppressed to protect your soul" at the same time as fulfilling the effective direction from NPOV to factually express all major viewpoints. As with any of our other limitations— I would recommend that people find other resources that meet their needs when Wikipedia doesn't, just as do for millions of other webpages. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
