Sunday, December 26, 2010

#WikiLeaks, naughty or nice

Love them or hate them, WikiLeaks generates strong opinions. This is true in the wide world and it is no different in the Wikipedia world. Recently I blogged about the featured picture candidate of a poster of Julian Assange and it will not feature.
Some of the arguments used not to feature are epic. The prize is for "Julian Assange is from Australia and it should therefore be honour not honor". Apparently there is a difference in Australian and US American honour.


The Signpost has a nice write up with arguments used to argue why leaked documents should or should not be used. What I am missing is perspective; it is not even necessary to quote WikiLeaks as it is renowned publishers like the New York Times who are co-publishers and who put their reputation on the line by publishing this material. When this is not accepted as source material, it becomes even more problematic to accept material from Fox. They are KNOWN to intentionally misrepresent the facts.


Disallowing WikiLeaks material will also damage the basic principle of the neutral point of view. Commons featured picture candidate process again proves to be misnomer; it should be the Commons featured pretty photo candidate process. The quality of the arguments used is the best indicator for its bias.
Thanks,
      GerardM

3 comments:

Jon Harald Søby said...

I would have voted against the picture, not for any political reasons (I support Wikileaks), but because it is a cheap knock-off of another famous picture, and doesn't really havy any merit of its own. I mean, there are generators on the web that lets *anyone* create a picture like that, so it is nothing special at all. If you want a featured picture of Assange that bad, you should spend some time trying to get a good freely licensed portrait of him on Commons instead of bickering about this particular image. Sure, some of the delete reasons are irrelevant as to the assessing of the quality of the image, but that doesn't change that the quality of the image isn't that good.

Bawolff said...

Yeah, american honour doesn't have the u in it :P

GerardM said...

What I care about is not so much this picture but the absurd arguments used.

In addition to this, multiple categories of pictures are not getting the life of day.
Thanks,
GerardM