User talk:198

Stop vandalising wikipedia. Take your concerns to the talk page or I will be forced to block you from editing. Theresa Knott (The torn steak) 23:34, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Removing objectionable material is not vandalism. Placing objectionable material should be considered vandalism, romiving it should (first off) have been the action of an admin, and when the admins failed in their responsibility, it fell to the rest of us with a sense of appropriateness. KeyStroke 21:52, 2004 Oct 10 (UTC)

This is your last warning about removing that picture. →Raul654 23:34, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)

I've protected the article so that you cannot remove it. This has the advantage of allowing you to voice your opinions without being tempted to vandalise the article. However protection is very unwiki and so we don't protect pages for long. |Learn to respect the community views, and abide by them. Do not try the vandalise the article or I will block you from editing this site. Theresa Knott (The torn steak) 23:50, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Hello "198", I am KeyStroke. I support you and your efforts to bring trustworthiness back to Wikipedia. I am glad that there is at least one person with a sense of appropriateness who is willing to take the risk you have and stand up to the amoral "group-think" mentality that has crept into Wikipedia, in general, and (appearantly) into the admins in particular.

Update. Reason has prevailed in at least one minor way. I was able to argue that it was inappropriate for Theresa Knott to both be the admin that put the page under protection, as well as arguing for one side of the dispute. This has resulted in her removing the protection. Now we can remove the offensive photograph. However, I am at work at the moment and do not want to risk bringing up a pornographic image on my computer (I could be fired for doing so). There is no way I know of to remove the image without first having it show up on my computer. So I cannot remove the image at this time. KeyStroke

Please learn the rules of the road

I see you are still having revert wars due to pictures you find offensive.

Sorry you find them offensive, but like any community, this one has rules and policies (indeed, these policies didn't show up overnight, and are the result of a lot of evolution) and as a member you have to respect them, or you will be asked to leave.

Please read over Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines, as well as Wikipedia:Three revert rule and Wikipedia:Wikiquette.

You have an opinion, and we respect it. Really. But we are a collaborative community, one in which every opinion counts, and the group consensus disagrees with you. Please, discuss your issues on the talk page, but don't continue an attempt to force your views, as it won't be well received, and, as you've seen, your edits end up getting reverted anyways. Kaszeta 00:17, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Kaszeta, the reason that the "group consensus" disagrees with the removal of the picture is because a lot of the individuals who edit Wikipedia, and more to the point the individuals who would seek out such a page as clitoris are males who are younger than the age of 30. This skews the profile and opinion. The admins need to be mroe responsible than the "group consensus" and safegaurd the trustworthiness of the whole site by making sure no suggestive or provocitive photos or text find their way onto the site. KeyStroke 21:52, 2004 Oct 10 (UTC)

Interesting point. If, indeed, the people accessing clitoris are males under 30, shouldn't we respect that (up to a point)? After all, perhaps they want to educate themselves about the (oft-elusive to the inexperienced male under 30) body part; not everyone is just looking up clitoris in a dictionary because they like pornography. Since it's talked about all the time in magazines, television, and popular culture in general, there is a real need for factual information, lest one form one's ideas about naughty parts from Sex and the City or Cosmopolitan magazine. To that end, I think a photograph is inherently much more informative than a drawing, whether or not it offends some sensibilities. Some of the diagrams suggested on the clitoris talk page are altogether scary, and don't convey the visual information that the article warrants.

About child filters: does the entire wikipedia become blocked when the clitoris photo is up, or just the clitoris article? If only the article is blocked, I don't see why that's a problem. If parents don't want their children to see vaginas, I don't see why they wouldn't object to articles about vaginas. I simply don't see the difference. If the entire wikipedia is blocked, that's a problem. However, I don't see why we should be forced to conform to flawed filtering software.

Nonetheless: would a link to the photo from the article be acceptable, KeyStroke, or 198, or to any of the others that come across this post? Timbo 19:25, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I'll take your above post from the bottom up. In my opinion, yes a link to a photograph would be acceptable, as long as the photograph doesn't reside under a Wikipedia domain. That why parents, teachers, clergy, librarians and others who want to protect children can do so without banning all of Wikipedia.

Regarding nanny-ware, it is my understanding that (at a minimum) the whole domain gets banned, meaning that you can't just ban a few articles, either all of Wikipedia gets banned, or none of it does. It may even be bigger than that, however. If the software operates off of IP addresses, it may not only ban all of Wikipedia, but all other websites that use the same first few numbers in the IP address.

We need to distinguish between those who are more likely to contribute to Wikipedia, and those who will derive the most value from reading the articles. Those who are contributing will (most likely) be over 20, those who will derive the most value from reading what is written are those under 18. My (wild haired) guess is that the age at which someone gets the most value out of Wikipedia would be about 15 or 16. So all the voting is skewed. No one who reads the articles, but does not contribute, gets any vote. More importantly, those parents who are not contributing (but who would see Wikipedia is highly valuable for their children to read) get any vote at all. If only the readers were voting, and not the writers (and for any reader under 18, if it was their parents that voted for them) then I am very confident you would see the voting skewed in the other direction. So we need to take a position of being trustworthy towards those who are not getting to vote. We need to be responsible for them.

There is no way for filtering software to know the content of an image. Filtering software relies on "reports" from users, and others, to know what web sites to filter. It is assumed that if Wikipedia will allow a pornographic image on one of its subordinate web pages, then a pornographic image could appear on any of its subordinate web pages. And that is an entirely accurate assumption. Therefore it is not the filtering software that is flawed. What is flawed is #1 the voting mechanism on Wikipedia and #2 the absence of a "moral code of ethics" from the owner. KeyStroke 21:08, 2004 Oct 19 (UTC)

Filters will block wiki I did a test with net-nanny recently and wikipedia is blocked.--198 00:46, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

9/11

Good job taking on Gzornenplatz on this article, who has been going after all the 9/11-related material in hopes of minimizing the event. There was a big to-do about this involving a lot of users a long time ago, and we wound up with the compromise of having "terrorist" in the article but not the title of the article (where it used to be). VeryVerily 00:38, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I don't really go for the weasely approach. The claim they were not terrorist is analogous to the claim that a plane never hit the Pentagon. VeryVerily 01:04, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The French Wikipedia's political articles are packed with fiction. I just try to ignore it. VeryVerily 01:19, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Replied on my talk page. —No-One Jones ^(m) 18:24, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

"terrorist"

That's a very good question. Thanks for contacting me. I, too, believe that the 9/11 attacks were terrorist attacks. Prince Bandar, George Bush, and most of humanity agree. However some do not. You know the saying: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." "Terrorist" is a label, like "freedom fighter". In the interest of NPOV, it's important to be careful not to state opinions as facts, even if the opinions seem obviously true to you. For instance, the Nazi page doesn't say "Nazis are evil", since that's a (well-founded) opinion.

In the case of the term "terrorist", it's much more subtle. It isn't the same as calling someone "evil", but it's definitely a loaded term. The word has a strong subjective meaning (a bad person), but it doesn't have a widely accepted objective meaning. (Was Nixon a terrorist? He bombed civilians in Laos. Is Yassir Arafat a terrorist?) No one has come up with a definition for "terrorist" that even half of commentators accept as legitimate. That's why a NPOV encyclopedia should try to avoid using the loaded term. The article on Terrorism is very informative on this.

Anyway, I hope I haven't offended you. I'm not some wild-eyed Islamist who thinks the 9/11 attacks were somehow justified. I just want to wiki Wikipedia NPOV. – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 01:17, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

The problem with this reasoning is that you can't infer that just because there are disputed accusations of terrorism, that terrorism itself is a disputed category. For instance, just because some believe that "taxation is theft" does not mean "theft" is therefore a POV category, or merely an opinion. This is the same illegitimate reasoning used by Wik in his successful revert war to eliminate terrorist from the titles. 9/11 was a terrorist attack; it does not possess any of the ambiguities which other cases do. VeryVerily 01:30, 20 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree with your theft example, but I disagree that the 9/11 attacks were unambiguously terrorist attacks. Here's why.

One definition of "terrorist attack" might be "an attack designed to instill fear in a population, to acheive a political objective." That's a perfectly reasonable definition. But there's no evidence of what al-Qaida's motivations were. Perhaps they didn't want to instill fear; perhaps it was an intentionally provocative attack. Maybe bin Laden wanted to goad the U.S. into counter-attacking, so that a jihad would result. If so, then the objective wasn't to instill fear, but to instill anger. So by the definition above, it wouldn't be terrorism.

Or someone else might say that terrorism requires that the targets be innocent civilians who are not taking part in the conflict. But the Pentagon attack wasn't against a non-military target. And some would say that the people in the WTC were passively taking part in the conflict (between the U.S. and the Muslim world) by passively contributing to the "American system". I think that's a cop-out, personally, but we can't state as a fact that the attacks were "terrorist" attacks if it can't be shown to be a fact. And since the word "terrorist" does not have a definition that most people agree on, it isn't factual, it's an opinion.

We can disagree on this, and that's fine. But the best way to deal with it is to take a straw poll and work towards consensus (instead of an edit war). – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 03:53, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

P.S. Reuters, one of the two most trusted news agencies in the world, doesn't use the word "terrorism" to describe the 9/11 attacks either. They explain:

We lost six members of the Reuters family and offices that housed 550 others who thankfully survived. From the first moments after the attacks, Reuters staff around the world worked tirelessly to account for their colleagues, restore our information services to customers, and report the news. However, these efforts have been overshadowed by the controversy over the policy of our Editorial group to avoid using emotional terms such as "terrorist" in their news stories. This policy has served Reuters and, more importantly, our readers well by ensuring access to news as it occurs, wherever it occurs. As a global news organization reporting from 160 countries, Reuters mission is to provide accurate and impartial accounts of events so that individuals, organizations and governments can make their own decisions based on the facts. . . Our policy is to avoid the use of emotional terms and not make value judgments concerning the facts we attempt to report accurately and fairly.

I couldn't have said it better myself. – Quadell ^{(talk) (help)}[[]] 05:11, Oct 20, 2004 (UTC)

(Discussion moved to Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks#The Great "Terrorism" Debate)

Karl Marx

Why do you insist on calling it high school? Not all English-speaking countries refer to it as high school, so it's essentially POV to compare it only to to that. Secondary school is the international term for the equivalent of what is high school in the United States, and therefore is much more neutral. Sarge Baldy 03:10, Oct 25, 2004 (UTC)

And most non-Americans won't. And Americans that don't can't click the convenient link to see what secondary education is. Sarge Baldy 03:14, Oct 25, 2004 (UTC)

Replied on my talk page. —No-One Jones ^(m) 05:10, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

User Irate

Irate has called me far worse than "idiot", and on more than just a few comments. Your options are a) get used to abuse, or b) mediation or arbitration. Good luck. Jayjg 05:22, 25 Oct 2004 (UTC)

And what were those things, or is this just another example of you blowing things up to hise your racism?--Jirate 11:59, 2004 Oct 25 (UTC)