--- Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com wrote:
groan...I have to retype this reply because I accidentally closed the window...
I feel for you man...
Christopher Mahan saith:
--- Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com wrote:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
Perhaps not, in fact, because the majority of people in the
world
want an unbiased source, and almost everyone knows that
education
material is biased. Being banned from schools might actually
be to
the project's benefit.
Mff. I go to a school. I want Wikipedia there.
If educational material is biased, all the more reason for an
NPOV
Wikipedia available from schools to independently verify the story given to us from the textbooks. And [[There is no Cabal]] of teachers intentionally giving us biased facts. I think I'm missing your logic somehow - could you explain how it would help the 'pedia if it were banned from schools?
The most effective and deadly weapons are banned from civilian
hands
(Armored personnel vehicles, Combat aircraft, heat-guided rocket launchers, grenades, C-4, full-auto M-16s (the list goes on)),
and
they are the ones professionals prefer, because of their effectiveness in their intended area of use.
Suppose you were designing a heat-guided launcher for profit. Would you allow it only to launch rockets, and then be marketed solely to professionals? Or would you instead enable launching water balloons for the citizens, and allow rocket-mode for the professionals only? For profit, I would choose the latter - more customers. But I'm still not _destroying_ the rocket-launching mechanism. I'm _disabling_ it for those who should only launch water-balloons. Same with the Wikipedia. We don't need to _remove_ potentially "dangerous" content. We merely need to _restrict_ it for those who shouldn't/wouldn't see it.
[sarcasm] Is that why F-16 jet-fighters come in a non-military version? [/sarcasm] hum sorry.
Likewise the W, as a comprehensive resource of unbiased,
in-depth,
well-referenced and pored over the world over tool of learning
and
referencey,
a what?? a "pored over the world over tool of learning and referencey"!?
pored over: looked over, investigated, viewed in detail.
the world over: all over the world
referencey: my bad. Typo. should be "reference".
would make any entity that is unconfortable withanthing
except their own version of the truth du jour wish to curtail its
use
among the more tender member of its society.
So we _allow_ the truth du jour to show in Wikipedia, but block the truth de la nuit*. Don't misunderstand me - I am fundamentally _not_ for censorship. I just think we need proactive smart censorship to defend from dumb censorship (think: school blocking software). If we want the Wikipedia to grow, we need to make it available in as many places as we can - and a prime place is in schools, whose role is, like the Wikipedia, to educate mankind.
*nuit=night, it's a word play/double-entendre
Being french, I got your ref.
I want to block no truth, but I want to be NPOV. Schools are not there to educate mankind. Schools are there to make people efficient workers. Libraries and bookstores educate people (which is to say people educate themselves.) (and by extension, encyclopedias are effectively self-education-enablers, so it would make twisted sense for them to be banned from schools).
As far as where to put the W where it can be seen by the most people in the world, I think http://www.wikipedia.org/ was a pretty good spot already.
I would rather the W become famous among leading geneticists and
PHDs
in history than among 9 graders.
How'd you guess my grade!?
The luck of the Irish, I guess.
To become famous among geneticists and Ph.D.'s, it must first become famous among the ninth-graders. We grow up, you know, and we _are_ the leading geneticists and Ph.D.'s twenty years hence. The more the general knowledge we have, the more the specific knowledge we can in the future learn - or create. Many famous persons in history have taught themselves Latin, or calculus, or something of the sort at a young age. The Wikipedia makes this easy. Opening it to 9th-graders will _increase_ the likelihood of the Wikipedia becoming famous among the famous.
Yes, but ninth graders don't have access to the same computing resources scientists do, so should supercomputer manufacturers make computers for nine-graders first? You use the right tool for the job.
I envision the W will in a few years become the peer-reviewed of all peered-reviewed resources, with article histories going back years, with references and cross-references that would make the most wizened librarian teary-eyed.
Yes, I said _opening_. Again, the point of self-censorship is to create _more_ readership in the Wikipedia. No, this isn't some "war is peace" backwards talk. Either we censor now or somebody will do it for us.
Like they censored Linux.
Anyway, censorship is bad, but most especially self-censorship.
I would *like* 9 graders to be able to use it, but not at the
expense
of seeming to the rest of the world to be a water-pistol in a
world
of precision-guided munition.
If we censor properly, do so only where necessary, not actually _remove_ content, and continue as we have been doing, we'll seem to the world like a
tachyon-positron-laser-beam-parallel-universe-three-second-destroyer
in contrast to ordinary, *boring* precision-guided munitions <yawn>. And yes, we'll seem like water-pistols to students, but in a world of drippy faucets. At least we won't be a disconnected faucet.
If the article is censored yet not removed, access must be restricted somehow. who controls the access? Jimmy? Sysops? the US Secretary of Education? a rabbi? a consortium?
If the access is not controlled, it might as well not be there.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
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