--- Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.org wrote:
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Daniel Ehrenberg wrote: | --- Sean Barrett sean@epoptic.org wrote: |>The only force observed to regularly get school boards to change what |>passes for their minds is public ridicule. I would be /delighted/ if a |>school board censored the Wikipedia, and the more false positives we can |>mock them for, the better. |> | | You can't think in that frame of mind. If Wikipedia | were banned in school, than many kids (at least two, | we know that for sure) will loose a valuable source of | information in the short term. | -LDan
I am genuinely sorry that you might be inconvenienced, Li'l Dan, but I can and do think in that frame of mind. Quite a few kids have managed to graduate from various sorts of educational establishments without the benefit of Wikipedia. If a few more have to struggle along for a few years only being able to access it from home, I consider it a trivial price to pay for improving the system over the long term.
To give you context: I have a five-year-old who is entering formal school this fall. Her future is my frame of mind. If the current victims of the government schools must continue to do without something they have never had before for a little while longer to give her a better future, I -- quite selfishly -- say "so be it." ~ Sean Barrett
I still don't really see what point it would prove. Say the National Christian Coalition (or whatever it's called) archived a Wikipedia page and pointed a bunch of people to it, saying that we claim it's an encyclopedia article (they like to do stuff like that). That page contains what some would call pornography. Sure, the actual page might have since changed, but now all of the schools and blocking software companies want to ban it. What do we do? No matter how much we said "it's an encyclopedia", they'd still point us to that archived page and say "no it's not, it's pornography". Or maybe they don't even archive it. Many people would be against the removal of content because it still has some degree of information in it (probably a lot). --LDan
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