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Joden (Dutch for Jews) should not be a banned word

MrJPGames-INGMrJPGames-ING Posts: 43 ✭✭✭
edited August 2022 in Report a Bug

Currently the word "Joden" (meaning Jews in Dutch) is banned from being included in the description of a wayspot. (At least in the Ingress submission process) (EDIT: It's also banned from Wayfarer description edits, so I'm assuming it's banned everywhere)

This check should be removed as honestly it's insulting and a little (but hopefully unintentionally) antisemitic.

I should be able to explain that a monument is there to remember the forceful deportation of a religious group in the Wayspot description. People should be brought to these places to remember those horrors of the past, and hopefully inform enough people to not make those mistakes again. Games like Ingress, Pogo etc. are a wonderful place to discover such places, and has made me see a ton of "Stolpersteine" and other local memorials for Jews during WWII. Those interactions have deepened my understanding of history. I wanted to increase that potential but for some reason it was made more difficult.

This should be allowed and no automated filter should ever block this: "Een monument ter herdenking van de razzia op 17 maart 1943, toen alle Joden uit Leiden naar Westerbork gedeporteerd werden."


I get that the word "Joden" can also be used in abusive antisemitic ways. But a blanket ban prevents proper use, and is thus making it harder to share this vital history. Blocking the word like this is antisemetic by not allowing those monuments against antisemitism to be more widely seen. And for those that use the word in an antisemetic way should be reported in the Wayfarer review process. No banned-word list should come into play here.

And no my current "solution" of using "Joodse mensen" (Jewish people) is not enough, and also clearly shows how antisemetic messages are not even blocked by this banned word, it's just stupid.


Thanks for coming to my Ted rant.

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Comments

  • HankWolfman-PGOHankWolfman-PGO Posts: 4,857 ✭✭✭✭✭

    I'm fairly sure that this word isn't banned for any reason relating to Dutch language. If you open up Google translate and set the input language to Spanish and the output language to English, and then input the banned word... Let's just say it would make much more sense to be banned for its Spanish definition.

  • MrJPGames-INGMrJPGames-ING Posts: 43 ✭✭✭

    @HankWolfman-PGO Fair enough. Which at least makes this as expected accidental/unintentional, which is good. But still this showcases why word-filters are a bad idea to use in any serious context. Now Wayspot submission is not the most critical thing of course, but especially due to it's human reviewed nature I think to avoid such issues as this in the future simply removing the word filter all together will do more good than harm.

    Because let's be honest they're already presenting us with pictures they have no control over, which can contain far worse things than anyone could write down. So let's just have the text come down to human review as well and remove the text-filter. This way no legitimate4 description is ever wrongfully blocked, and any abusive messages (which you can write just fine avoiding the specific words anyhow) will be filtered out by humans.

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