Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
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!"
Yeah, sorry, I'm just not seeing where you're getting "plaudits" (praise, accolades) out of all this. There are other motivations for doing useful things than wanting a pat on the back.
Earlier you wrote "Yes, I am leaping to the conclusion that making Wikipedia an attractive resource for teachers for use with kids is an improvement."
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?
I suspect adults complain because the content is there. Teachers etc know that the web is filthy, they just (afaik) want a reference site where their kids aren't going to be looking at porn.
Ok, so someone else could fork us and produce a meta-stable "clean" version. Wait, doesn't answers.com do that already?
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...
So, plot details are facts, but naked breasts are subjective. I disagree completely. If anything, I think what is a spoiler is very subjective - no distinction is made between details of unaired episodes, minor plot points and character deaths, soapies and suspense thrillers, for example. Whereas, as we've seen, the examples where content ratings are contentious are fairly contrived, and mostly come down to whether nude art is pornographic or not.
Whoops, we should probably swap all instances of "subjective" and "objective" in those two paragraphs.
However, "offensive" is most definately a subjective term - the term "bugger" can be offensive in certain contexts, as can the infamous phrase "so where the bloody hell are you"...
"Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of electron flow" in [[electricity]].
Sure, that's a great example. No, really.
So, you're willing to tag *all* articles based on their content?
Are you then willing to tag the list of tags?
"Warning: this set of articles have been identified of being of a biologically accurate/theologically dubious/unscientific nature"? (sex, evolution, and creation respectively)
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?
Presumably you would make the same argument for removing braille markings from food products in supermarkets.
Braille on food products is expected by people with impaired vision. Who is going to which readers do and don't see the warnings? Please stop trying to build strawmen...