Category talk:Free speech

Latest comment: 3 years ago by Pi zero in topic Digital censorship?

Digital censorship? edit

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Censorship redirecting to free-speech makes it weird to add this category for digital censorship article. How do we handle that? Though it must be noted free speech is often used to fight digital censorship.
•–• 06:52, 25 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

I have treated this category as a significant illustration of how the structure of Wikidata can be too rigid to naively generate interwikis. When I looked into how different-language Wikinewses handle this topic, I found that some have some sort of free-speech category, while others have some sort of censorship category, and blatantly these categories ought to be interwiki-ing to each other because they are the relevant analogs to each other on the various Wikinews projects. But semantically —which is what matters on Wikidata, as they imagine themselves to be setting up an absolute ontology (as if there were such a thing) in which concepts should be pulled apart as much as possible with the finest distinctions possible (not at all what interwikis should be about)— free speech and censorship do not mean the same thing. They serve pretty much the same function on the respective wikis, but definitely have very different meanings. I found it interesting to realize that free speech is a concept oriented toward an optimistic view, censorship toward a pessimistic view.

This, then, is how we've handled it, so far: if you want to know about censorship, you look in the free-speech category. I s'pose, on a project that uses the opposite orientation by having a censorship category, if you wanted to know about free speech you'd have to look in the censorship category, which does feel a bit more narrow. I would think it would get rather confusing to have both, though. --Pi zero (talk) 12:59, 25 October 2020 (UTC)Reply

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