Kasutaja:Oop/Bowdlerizing Wikipedia

„The Board of Trustees has directed the Wikimedia Foundation to develop and implement a personal image hiding feature.

Its purpose is to enable readers to easily hide images on the Wikimedia projects that they do not wish to view, either when first viewing the image or ahead of time through individual preference settings. The feature is intended to benefit readers by offering them more choice, and to that end it will be made as user-friendly and simple as possible. We will also make it as easy as possible for editors to support.
The feature will be developed for, and implemented upon, all projects. It will aim to be culturally neutral and inclusive. It will not permanently remove any images: it will only hide them from view on request.“

That's why there is currently an image filter referendum, asking Wikipedia editors' opinion about such a feature.

Although this particular idea is not dangerous by itself, bowdlerization is intimidating for Wikipedia's future because this is opening a door that will be hard to close. If we are starting with hiding information that some people think offends them, where do we draw the line?

Indeed, if we admit that some people are offended by sexual or violent images, why do we not care about their feelings in other matters? Shouldn't we offer a feature to hide Nazi-related information from those whose families have suffered in Holocaust? But then, what about those who have suffered under Soviet regime? And those who are offended by the independence claims of Taiwan or Tibet?

Why only images, if we could mark some passages in text, too, with special markers? Why shouldn't we offer a parental control feature that would allow someone to hide some things from everyone on a certain computer or, possibly, local network?

Also, if we start to teach our editors thinking in these terms, paying attention not only to the correctness of provability of information, but also possible subjective feelings of readers, how can we say this large cultural change in Wikipedia will not influence our content as a whole, so in the end, editors will start to censor their own text? After all, self-censoring is the most widespread censorship there is, and the most powerful.

These are subtle changes, that could be brought on, step by step, by conscientious people with high ethical criteria. Yet in the end, we would be quite far from free knowledge. Then again, maybe we shouldn't even start on that road?