Wikipedia May Censor Images 171
KiloByte joins the ranks of accepted submitters, writing
"To appease 'morality' watchdogs, Wikipedia is contemplating the introduction of a censorship feature, where images would be flagged for containing sexual references, nudity, 'mass graves,' and so on. At least in the initial implementation, it is supposed to be 'opt-in.' However, with such precedents as the UK censoring artistic nudity, Turkey censoring references to the Armenian genocide or China's stance on information about the Tiananmen massacre (note that any sensitive photos, like the Tank Man, are already absent!), I find it quite hard to believe this feature won't be mandatory for some groups of readers — whether it's thanks to an oppressive government, an ISP or a school."
Well, at least it's opt-in (Score:2)
Today it is, anyway.
Hey, anyone remember when banning users was solely an ISP decision, not a government mandate [arstechnica.com]? Boy, those were the days.
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I remeber working at my university's CS help desk, deleting email after email of usenet abuse reports. There was some masterful trolling going on in those days and I was happy to have a position to not only be audience to it, but to help it continue.
To think future generations will be denied that by oppressive governments makes me sad.
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Sou you are the one responsible for the demise of the Usenet! :-)
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"Freedom of speech doesn’t protect speech you like; it protects speech you don’t like." -- Larry Flynt
"The worst thing about censorship is ###### ####."
Also, the "junk filter" is as bad as DHTML routines on this page. No, really. It is. Seriously.
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It would be possible for a proxy or national firewall to redirect all requests for Wikipedia through a particular Wikipedia account where they had set the "hide obscenity" flag. So all users within that country, by default, wouldn't see the "offensive" stuff. The hard work of tagging, categorizing images, and rewriting the HTML, would have been done by Wiki
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Wikipedia's image filter would just hide images per default, you're still able to see them with just one click, at any time.
This in no way helps oppressive governments. It is about a client-side cookie and that way the client can control everything at all times. (There's not even a way for a school to hide all images, since you can always override your filter settings by clicking on the image placeholder)
If an evil government tried to filter images, they'd have to prevent pictures from actually being sent o
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You assume no one will force that cookie onto you -- or onto Wikipedia itself.
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Yes, that assumption is common among those who lack the kind of paranoia necessary to turn a simple opt-in filtering system in to a plot to forever prevent users from fapping to the fine quality close-ups of vaginas Jimbo has assembled for our lonely pleasure.
That this article got posted leads me to make three assumptions.
1) You trolled Soulskill good. Now, Soulskill being a bit of a plank means that you don't get many points for this.
2) Soulskill was hired to post paranoid speculative shit as "news". If th
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On the flip side, this is enabling censorship groups (or whatever you want to label them). While on a personal level, humans are generally good, but the whole of humanity can do some pretty horrific things. Censoring these ugly facts about ourselves certainly don't do anything to help bridge the wealth/income gap.
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This in no way helps oppressive governments. It is about a client-side cookie
The important thing is the database of "bad images" exists and requests for an image can be checked against the DB relatively easilly (otherwise the blocking feature wouldn't work). All other details of how the blocking system works for opt-in users are irrelevent to those who plan to use it as a datasource for censorship.
If an evil government tried to filter images, they'd have to prevent pictures from actually being sent over the internet.
Once the "evil government" has the ability to check an image against the list of "bad images" it is easy for them to build a proxy that blocks any image on the "bad images" list and redire
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It's better to have a ReallyPedia than one that's censored, or needs opt-in or "I'm 18, show me the image". To get around the age of majority problem, it ought to be vetted for access. Images are, and history is, what it was. Those that fear history don't learn from it.
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Pretty much what I was thinking when I read the "please become a beta-tester to help us develop this capability" email.
Which I haven't answered yet. Because I'm thinking about it.
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All this discussion is for not.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content [wikimediafoundation.org]
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BT, the main ISP in the UK, recently opened everyone's home wireless routers up to allow any BT customer free access to any other BT router. When I queried this I was told we'd "been opted in" to the scheme, but could opt out if we wanted to. So for BT at least, "opt-in" means anyone who hasn't specifically opted out, and you aren't allowed to opt out until you've already been opted in.
In principle it's not too bad (Score:4, Insightful)
The way I understand the problem is that some articles show explicit pictures, which may offend some people. Honestly it has happened to me sometimes to see pictures of illnesses or war crimes which did upset me (granted, I have a very low threshold for these things).
I don't see how it would be bad to hide these pictures by default, with a little button "view" next to the caption.
Of course, if the goal is to delete these pictures altogether, then I'm all against it.
In principle it's very bad (Score:5, Insightful)
It may end the "Endless (human anus) image contention" dispute.
Damn, this was the most entertaining section of wikipedia.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Human_anus#Endless_image_contention [wikipedia.org] )
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Thank you so much. That is the funniest thing I have seen all week, maybe all year. Oh man, that is absolutely hilarious. Brilliant, thank you for sharing.
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As much as I think that sex may not be appropriate for kids, I think many natural things are worse than that, like seen the arm of a fire-ants victim. Disturbing stuff!
So the thing is... where do you draw the line?
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It was probably good, but I never saw it because after 20 mins into it (listen to me 20 MINUTES), everyone watching the movie was "WTF?" but nobody could believe it.
So while you may find this story entertaining and my dad couldn't care less about the movies he rented. I would agree that there is content that kids shouldn't be watchi
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The way I understand the problem is that some articles show explicit pictures, which may offend some people. Honestly it has happened to me sometimes to see pictures of illnesses or war crimes which did upset me (granted, I have a very low threshold for these things).
Good, anyone who can see pictures like that without getting upset is most likely a psychopath.
Censoring those pictures are however not the answer, stopping the actions that are depicted in those pictures are.
No matter how much you censor, bad things will still happen and covering your eyes and ears just because you don't want bad things to happen is irresponsible.
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This is actually a good idea. The image is still there and fully available, but it gives you a one click warning to decide if it's appropriate to have it open a
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Oh noes, you're offended by reality. Get over it. Just like everyone else. It's supposed to be an encyclopedia of FACTS. Fact is, war, famine, sex, drugs, and vulgarity are part of the life we live in. Should we start adding censors to articles on "Intelligent Design" because it's offensive to the people who know it's not factual?
Slippery slope and one that we do not need to go down.
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Oh noes, you're offended by reality. Get over it. Just like everyone else. It's supposed to be an encyclopedia of FACTS. Fact is, war, famine, sex, drugs, and vulgarity are part of the life we live in. Should we start adding censors to articles on "Intelligent Design" because it's offensive to the people who know it's not factual?
Getting upset or offended by stuff is human nature. I bet seeing pictures of the little girl ripped to pieces by the neighbors pet dog in Melbourne the other day would be upsetting, maybe even more so if you are a parent (or maybe that's just me), and maybe even more so if you've ever been attacked by a dog yourself.
People aren't robots, and whether rational by your standards or not, some of reality scares people. Don't you wish there was a pixelation mask over goatse with a caption "wash your eyes after cl
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I really don't know how else to say it, but seriously - real life is horrid sometimes. IMHO, if you want to know about the subject, you should have to see it, unvarnished and as it really is. If you can get a grasp as to how horrible something truly is, maybe it'll motivate you to help try and prevent it from happening - be it a disease or a war crime. I could understand not having it shoved into your face when you're not looking it up, but at the same time... you're looking it up. If you want to know about
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I want the raw reality people to allow the people who don't want to see it have an opportunity to turn it off.
...in which case you can simply not look up war crimes and such on Wikipedia, and rely on someone else to filter it down for you.
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Life is full of nasty things. We're a coddled civilization, and hence a rather weak and pathetic one.
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A system whose purpose is to curate what amounts to a record of the entire record of kno
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Opt-in to censor out fair use (Score:4, Informative)
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It won't be useful for that.
What makes you think that? As far as I can tell, such an opt-in censorship tool will involve the categories associated with each file's description page. Militant anti-non-free-content users who think no picture at all is better than a non-free picture, such as the one who wrote this essay [wikipedia.org], will likely push for non-free to be the sixth (you think) category.
Oh good, let's have a debate (Score:4, Interesting)
Censorship is teh evil!!!
But it's better to get SOME content than NO content...
But censorship, it's evil!
We go through this with Google and China every so often. What I worry about isn't having stuff blocked, with a nice big notice that something was removed, but about having content replaced, so that when you go look at stuff about Chinese unrest from the USA it says "chinese know all about this stuff" and when you look it up from China it says "everything is wonderful".
Re:Oh good, let's have a debate (Score:5, Insightful)
Choice is not censorship. As far as I can tell, Wikimedia is considering to add the option for users to block images that have been flagged as potentially offensive. Since Wikipedia covers many aspects of humanity, some of them scary, it makes sense to enable users to filter some of the more graphic aspects of this. Remember, the articles themselves will not be blocked. I think this would make Wikipedia more useful for kids that might not have the tools to deal with looking straight into another person's guts just because their reading up on surgery.
Many other sites, such as DeviantArt, block nudity by default, and to view it you must register an account and turn the filter off. Even though this is opt-out and a bit extreme, calling the practice censorship is ridiculous.
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Fixed this for ya':
Choice is not currently censorship. As far as I can tell, Wikimedia is considering to add a future requirement for users to block images that have been flagged as potentially offensive. Since Wikipedia covers many aspects of humanity, some of them scary to the ignorant, it makes sense to enable ignorant users to filter some of the more graphic aspects of this. Remember, the articles themselves will not be blocked for now. I think this would make Wikipedia more useful for adults that might not have the tools to deal with looking straight into another person's guts just because their reading up on exactly that.
Many other sites, such as DeviantArt, block nudity by default, and to view it you must register an account and turn the filter off. Even though this is opt-out and a bit extreme, calling the practice censorship is predictive.
Children usually don't mind seeing new things, until they are taught by adults that the imagery/context is "dirty" or bad from an adult reaction to seeing it.
Although some are saying let's not call this a "slippery slope" yet, when do you? History has shown as soon as tools such as this are created, a government or organization somewhere requires their application. This is true to such a degree that a local library often has patrons shocked that their internet computers are not filtere
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It's okay I bet the Hovering Chinese Guys [blippitt.com] are already working on fixing any fake information.
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I was talking about the other issues raised and even discussed in the summary, i.e. "I find it quite hard to believe this feature won't be mandatory for some groups of readers â" whether it's thanks to an oppressive government, an ISP or a school." I don't expect you to RTFA, but you could at least browse TFS.
may? (Score:4, Informative)
the referendum was not about "should we add a filter" but "how should a filter implemented".
the resolution "controversial content" [wikimedia.org] was approved 10:0 in May 2010
We ask the Executive Director, in consultation with the community, to develop and implement a personal image hiding feature that will enable readers to easily hide images hosted on the projects that they do not wish to view
The foundation wants a filter, the community has no way to stop such a feature.
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English speakers use English language sources (Score:3)
Furthermore the Wikipedia is completely biased towards the United States.
Are you talking about Wikipedia in general, or the English Wikipedia specifically? Wikipedia acknowledges its systemic bias [wikipedia.org] as a problem. The bias you speak of is caused by the tendency of people to contribute to the Wikipedia for their native language and to cite sources written in their native language. And by far, the biggest concentration of English speakers on the Internet is in the United States, and sources written in English tend to cover the views of people in anglophone countries more than others.
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you cannot focus on the reception history of a work of art
I thought, based on my interpretation of English Wikipedia's policy on verifiability [wikipedia.org] and on writing about works [wikipedia.org], the production history and reception history were the most important things on which to focus because they are the most verifiable things about a work.
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Actually, nothing will get done unless someone traels through the images and decides which to filter. This is the community. And their will be fights for borderline cases.
The "community" is very much in charge, here.
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Let's not go overboard (Score:4, Interesting)
I got the email for the referendum. Let's not say "OMG slippery slope!" quite yet, ok? If this continues to be voluntary, I have absolutely no problem with it. I won't personally turn it on because very little offends me, but if someone else doesn't want to view pictures of genetalia on their respective articles, I can understand that.
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The problem is that the moment such a filter is implemented, organizations that already use other methods to get rid of images they don't approve, will demand such filter to be enabled on their whim, without allowing people to opt out.
The client always retains control (Score:2)
Wikipedia's image filter would just hide images per default, you're still able to see them with just one click, at any time.
This in no way helps oppressive governments. It is about a client-side cookie and that way the client can control everything at all times. (There's not even a way for a school to hide all images, since you can always override your filter settings by clicking on the image placeholder)
If an evil government tried to filter images, they'd have to prevent pictures from actually being sent o
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And Wikipedia can still tell them to fuck off.
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The problem is that the moment such a filter is implemented, organizations that already use other methods to get rid of images they don't approve, will demand such filter to be enabled on their whim, without allowing people to opt out.
As long as the organization's you are referring to are not ISP's then I'm fine with this too. If you're on someone else's equipment (eg: work), you are subject to their rules.
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Let's not say "OMG slippery slope!" quite yet, ok?
What, you want a voluntary filter as well?
Think of the children (Score:2)
Especially the children of Gene Talia.
Tank Man photo not censored by China (Score:5, Informative)
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Yes, I know the artist claims the painting is not a representation of what actually happened at Tiananmen (it's just "inspired" by Tiananmen), but it's pretty clear the men are being executed, I don't care if they're laughing or not. That artist is incredibly brave.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man
Hey look...the photo.
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NSFW (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:NSFW (Score:5, Funny)
But this filter should work both ways, so one could choose to see ONLY the NSFW articles :-)
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Perhaps schools and workplaces can grow up and not cause a panic over an educational image that somebody might shocking showing up on the screen?
Bottom line, folks (Score:1, Insightful)
Censorship needs a foundation of classification and identification.
Censorship cannot work without differentiation.
Traditionally, governments have employed armies of censors to root out unapproved media and identify it for further control, whether that be by name, URL, or another identifier.
Wikipedia's tagging of potentially offensive media is like a crowdsourced censorship bureau.
Imagine if all images had EXIM fields of "controversial" and "pornographic." Totalitarian regimes would block all image requests
Keep calm and carry on (Score:2)
Not censor, an opt-in filter (Score:5, Insightful)
I took several minutes to read this 2 days ago when I first saw the news (2 days... slashdot, what's happened to you?) and it actually looked damned uncontroversial and careful.
First, I'd say calling this censorship is a red herring.
Censorship = removal of information without recourse or alternative.
Opt-in filtering = giving parents and the squeamish a way to preemptively hide images, with user-controlled overrides.
The categories sought for filtering is also intended to be peer-managed within wikipedia, which should prevent this from becoming a tool for governmental / corporate / ISP censorship. IOW, if users guide the categorization of data (tagging images as sexually explicit, violent, etc) then a gov/corp/ISP can't 'sneak in' the censorship of an article on Turkey, Israel, Net Neutrality, Codomo, China-vs-Taiwan, China-vs-Tibet, Egyptian unrest or whatever.
The call for comments generated by Wiki* also discussed their desire to make whatever they do overridable.
(disclaimer: I think I've edited wiki* a few dozen times, but doubt it was anything censor-worthy).
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Even in this very comment you already included an example of someone opting a third party in.
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2 days... slashdot, what's happened to you?
I know! I love how quick they've become too!
What sort of censorship? (Score:1)
I'm thinking this should be sort of like the spoiler text used on many image boards, where initially all you see is black, but if you scroll over it you can see what it actually is. I think this would work perfectly for Wikipedia; if you didn't want to see it, you didn't have to. This way it means it would be censored for anyone who didn't want to see it, and anyone who does want to see it would just have to hover over it with their mouse and it would become visible.
The worse evil is censorship. (Score:3)
Censorship is always more offensive than the material being censored.
Those who can understand this are holders of a higher ethic, and it is no bad thing to force this standards on those who have yet to be elevated.
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Do you also oppose adblock and such tools? If not, why? After all, they are 'censoring' in exactly the same way this is.
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AdBlock is done on the client side, this means the government can't issue a law or make a deal with Wikipedia to force it upon you. They'd have to disable SSL access and run man-in-the-middle proxies on all traffic.
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So what? All this is is a tool, to allow people to control what they do or do not want to see. That is a perfectly legitimate thing. The fact that maybe some government could abuse the tool is completely immaterial. Ever since man first sharpened a stick every tool created could potentially be abused by someone. If that happens, complain about the abuse and the abusers, not the tool.
It's not censorship (Score:4, Insightful)
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FFS. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Good thing, until lawyers take it this far:
Your Honor, the client's defense crumbles in light of this new evidence. He clearly enjoys seeing photographs of lewd nature. If he did not, why would he have set the cookie on Wikipedia that allowed them to be viewed on his screen?
(totally ignoring the possibility that maybe the guy blocked images of dismemberment while viewing an article about war one time, and didn't block other things because they weren't onscreen)
It's a little chilling. I would prefer to be fo
It's commercial. (Score:2)
This is not bad. Here's why. (Score:1)
This is not bad, because the system, as proposed, is basically going to be just an improved and integrated reimplementation of an already existing feature.
You may have heard of it. It's called "AdBlock Plus".
That's essentially what the Wikipedia community has been telling people to use. Offended by pictures of prophets? Ask your local friendly religious WikiProject if they have a handy ABP list or user CSS file for you to use. Offended by sexual content? Yeah, it's a lot of blocking, but it can be done.
All
Wikipedia lost it's relevance (Score:1)
One does wonder... (Score:2)
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If pictures of the topic offended them, why were they on the topic in the first place? If you don't want to see pictures of vaginas, maybe you shouldn't look up vaginas?
Indeed. Because clearly there is no better way of teaching someone biology* than to simply show them a bunch of pictures of different people's vaginas. </sarcasm>
The main problem is that even though medical illustrations are both prevalent and often better at highlighting small details (artists can control contrast of areas very easily to show off such details), there are many exhibitionists out there who add self-made images just because they can. Most people don't post these images for their encyclo
Flag everything and add a disclaimer. (Score:2)
Be really blunt about it to chase off the sensitive fucks who start this shit in the first place. The way to react to PC bullshit is with scorn and open hatred because courtesy is wasted on such people.
"This site may offend you. If it is possible to offend you then go the fuck away and never come back because no one here needs you as a viewer."
There really ARE valid reasons for harsh netiquette.
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They already do, but probably not as harshly as you'd want [wikipedia.org], via the "Disclaimers" link on most pages. As an added bonus, it's the rationale for not putting those spoiler warnings in pages anymore.
Censorship is Bad, but so is Hysteria (Score:2)
How does this comport with NPOV? (Score:2)
While I think Wikipedia has strayed greatly from its original goals and principles, I thought one of the most important ones was maintaining a "neutral" point-of-view in articles. How is marking certain images as "offensive" showing neutrality? If an image is illustrative to the content of an article and it is legal to be used, then whether or not some people find it offensive ought to have no bearing on its inclusion. I think that the inevitable debates over whether or not an image is offensive will ser
Wikipedia isn't censoring images... (Score:2)
Click to view? (Score:2)
How about not show the image until someone clicks on something that makes it visible? This way, if someone goes to the page on "ejaculation", they don't, by default, see an animated gif of some dude ejaculating. But if they REALLY WANT TO, they can click to view it. Either way, they still have access to the text that describes the biology.
But maybe I'm missing the point.
I have a better idea (Score:2)
They should have a "notability filter": instead of deleting so-called "non-notable" articles, they get added to the filter so that deletionists can see the nice, clean, austere Wikipedia they've always dreamed of, while the rest of us get the real thing.
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I hate to sound like a think of the children type of person.
But Wikipedia is a great tool to start your research with, and really good for education. However I can expect kids using Wikipedia in schools to view imagery that they are not allowed, and inappropriate for a school.
It isn't as much they are forced to view the data, but kids being both curious and wanting to show to there peers that they are cool, will use such imagery to cause trouble and get cool points because they can gather a bunch of curiou
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You do realize those kids can already do that now with a book encyclopedia, right? This does nothing to stop that.
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Pretty much. Wikipedia is just a more convenient version of National Geographic and your mom's medical self-help book.
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Quite right. We should also ban adblock and such things, because how dare someone decides what they do and do not want to see.
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It's like requesting the Louvre Museum to cover up the Venus de Milo statue during my visit because I find female anatomy "offensive" or "immoral".
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It's your responsibility to avoid what you don't want to see.
The other way round makes no sense because they world is full of pussies, each with unique sets of "crap they don't want to see".
The sum of all those sets is EVERYTHING that exists.
Of course, what gets censored is decided on your behalf by some corrupt authority or other, which is why censorship is always evil.
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Oh fuck off. Why is your right to see whatever crap you want any more important than my right not to see it?
He being allowed to see it does not preclude you from not seeing it. Censorship prevents everyone from seeing it.
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Yes, but why are you talking about censorship on a thread about an opt-in feature?
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You have every right not to go there in the first fucking place, thereby exercising YOUR right to opt-out.
No one is giving you the Clockwork Orange eyelid clamp treatment. You have to navigate TO a site to view it. Please don't breed.
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This is Wikipedia, not a national policy.
Unless a nation requires that all people on its soil opt in to the "self-censored" Wikipedia.