Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/28/06, charles matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
I would call it a complete change from five years
of getting the
encyclopedia written. It bears repetition: the mission is to get the
encyclopedia written, the free NPOV encyclopedia. Not to try to gather
plaudits from classroom teachers. It's an old discussion here: GFDL means
_someone else_ can perfectly well make the fork that is more child-safe.
Wait, where did anyone mention plaudits? You want to get the
encyclopaedia written. I want the encyclopaedia to be useful to
people. These goals are not incompatible.
You want Wikipedia to be "safe for work", where "work" includes in
classrooms. The logical conclusion is that being "classroom-safe" will
earn us plaudits from teachers. "Wow, a free encyclopedia, which doesn't
include all the naughty things which are illegal to teach in
Texas/Kansas/North Korea!"
With any luck, they revise their views on the
Internet as a whole. The
place is not 'safe for minors'. I don't know where they might have got the
idea that it is.
You could hope for that.
That an openly editable, largely unmoderated, uncensored website will be
"safe for minors"? OTRS gets enough complaints from *adults* about
"pornographic vandalism". Why should we offend minors any less?
It's good to know that the fine old tradition
of monolingual Anglo-Saxons is
in such good shape.
It's in excellent shape. And it's pretty much monolingual anglosaxons
who have driven Wikipedia thus far.
Odd, I could have sworn that it was the German language Wikipedia which
had produced three hardcopies of its content...
But the whole concept of a 'safe'
Wikipedia is just crocked. What we have
is 'knowledge wants to be free', and a few semi-permeable membrances put up
on the wiki will not suffice to counter the osmotic pressure.
How about a "safer" Wikipedia? We have spoiler tags on articles about
movies and TV shows, and that didn't seem to cause anyone a
philosophical crisis. How would content tags be vastly different?
A spoiler warning indicates the *fact* that an article contains "plot or
solution details" on the subject of the article. Content warnings would
be incredibly objective and POV - once you start putting up "offensive
content" tags, it's a slippery slope to...
"Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of electron flow"
in [[electricity]].
Answer: They would be invisible to most users.
Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of
having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?
--
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