Erik Moeller wrote:
Jimmy-
If we were writing disclaimers at the top of some
pages, we would
require the disclaimer to be NPOV. We wouldn't say "This page is bad
for children." And we wouldn't say "Anyone who doesn't let children
read this is a stick in the mud." We would say "Some may consider
this page inappropriate for children."
That's fair enough. I will add the appropriate disclaimers to all the
pages about Christianity, which I consider potentially dangerous to
children. Of course I will do so in an NPOV way. ;-)
Can you see where this is going? Standards for what is and isn't
appropriate for children or adults vary so greatly that any offensiveness
disclaimer is bound to be either POV (because we only add it to some
pages) or useless (because we add it to all pages). We can't really solve
this in the wiki way, *if* we are going to add disclaimers/filters, these
have to be configurable. One size doesn't fit it all.
To me, the filtering ability of coding boxes is incidental to having an
indexing system that can be scaled up to an ever larger Wikipedia. The
filtering possibilities would be rudimentary. There could be a place on
the preferences page for a user to indicate the codes for articles not
to be downloaded. Thus (without prejudice to what the codes might
actually become), he could enter SEX, REL, or GEO for sex, religion or
geology. (There is a risk that an article on geology could be preaching
evolution. ;-) ) In many cases where the parent would use the filter
the kid is often smarter, and can probably figure out the override long
before the parent realizes. I may not always admit it to him, but I
feel proud when my 13 year old does things better than I do.
Choosing whether an article will be subject to a particular filtering
code is so subjective as to often be meaningless, but having this sort
of thing available has a tremendous public relations value..Some porno
sites put a long list of unlikely words on their home page to improve
the chance that a search engine can find them. Filtering them all can
be a losing battle.
Ec