I didn't participate in the referendum. I understood from the beginning that this was going to be implimented, the matter of community opinion is nice to ask for but didn't really matter, and ultimately the only thing that comes of this is help answering Islamic users questioning us showing depictions of Mohammed.
The conversation in this thread has been engaging in helping me decide my opinion on a personal level: I'll go with the filter as responsible concept. Milos, you state that Americans see everything involving nudity under the label as porn and offensive, and filtering with that mindset is a bad idea. You're correct about Americans acting that way in general. I could pull a juvenile prank and replace someone's computer background with the image of a penis, and it will be called porn. It's not, it's an image of a penis, but that's the feeling we evoke. We're growing and developing in Islamic countries and countries with a high percentage of Islamic population. A highly held principle is not seeing, publishing, or distributing depictions of Mohammed. This is a deeply felt belief, one which makes any claims to offending morals seem trivial. We had a massive problem at the Arabic Wikipedia over providing content that depicted Mohammed. From our standpoint in customer relations on OTRS and on Wikimedia projects in general, we could do little but provide information on how the hide all images with the disclaimer of NOTCENSORED, NPOV, you should be more cultured than to believe that's actually what Mohammed looked like/be more open minded...the list goes on. Now, when we choose to point to cultural trends as a reason something is bad, the argument will die. If you inform most of the Western readers that you are offended by images of Mohammed, at some point someone will have the same reaction that happens when talking about Americans and sexual images. Americans might have the same argument used against them with Muslems. The point is that we have to respect cultural norms and see why they are what they are. We can disagree, but the first step for globalization is the ability to say "Oh, I see where you're coming from." What is fundamentally ingrained in a culture is part of the root of that culture. We're global, but culture is not. Which leads to... On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 2:58 AM, Fajro <fai...@gmail.com> wrote: > Can anyone explain me how this Image Filter is not against the mission > of the Wikimedia Foundation? > > Letting some users to block Wikipedia content is NOT a good way to > "disseminate it effectively and globally" as stated in the mission > statement. > > http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement > > > -- > Fajro > I fundamentally disagree. If the content can be managed to be culturally sound, that is effective to disseminate globally. If Islamic countries do not want to see images of Mohammed, that is effect in maintaining other content without blocking the site. Same applies to other religious imagery, political imagery, sexual imagery, and whatever else. The filter is for images, and while pictures are louder than words, we can at least have the words while maintaining cultural integrity. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l