Why does the BBC allow profane names of artists, tracks or albums to be displayed in full in some places while it hides them in others?
In a small fraction of the content we include in our pages from Wikipedia and MusicBrainz – specifically the names of artists, albums and tracks – there will be language that is offensive to some members of the audience. Context is a key factor in whether we choose to display such language in its original form, or to mask it by the use of asterisks. Our general principle is to avoid exposing users to such content accidentally, but not to censor it unduly. In specific terms, wherever an artist name appears in a programme tracklist, search result or any other kind of aggregation we will mask it. However, where users have chosen to navigate to an artist’s page we feel it would be unnecessary and patronising to continue to mask the offending words, for example within the text of a biography. Similarly, where there are profanities in track names we will not display them in the context of tracklists for programmes that play a variety of artists, but we do display them in album tracklists on
