Re^2: Consideration for obscenity

[Joost]

I notice you didn't address my main point, that the Perlmonks policy as written is fundamentally inconsistent with the position that nodes like this should not be censored if some people don't find them offensive. I would like to see that point addressed in this thread.

I thought I did address that point: Perlmonks policy is to consider for deletion "highly offensive posts". If enough monks don't think it should be deleted, it is assumed the node is not highly offensive or otherwise inappropriate and therefore it should not be deleted.

My point is, that the policy isn't a firm rule but a guideline that the monks are supposed to take in account when considering nodes. There's nothing in the policy that determines how monks should vote after a node is put up for deletion (and that's probably a good thing).

update: if your point is that my interpretation of the policy is incompatible with the stated goal of "[keeping] PerlMonks off of corporate blacklists", that might be true to an extent, but note that we can't know what exactly is being blacklisted for all monks.

Should we also censor nodes mentioning the Republic of China for those monks living behind the firewalls of the People's Republic of China? (Yes, I know that's not a corporate blacklist, but the effect is the same but with a potentially much larger impact).

My point is just that cultural & political values vary quite a bit, and so does what is considered offensive. We can't hope to make everybody happy, so potential troubling nodes are put to a vote, the "worst" stuff is reaped, some other stuff is kept and if you have a corporate firewall you can at least argue with a straight face if the site is blocked. Perlmonks isn't exactly a comparable to http://b3ta.com/ when it comes to text. Things here are normally pretty polite and professional.

If that means perlmonks is not available everywhere, that's a shame but there's really not much that can be done about it except make our own blacklist that includes everybody else's rules. I hope you agree that's not a good solution.