--- Sean Barrett <sean(a)epoptic.org> wrote:
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Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
| --- Sean Barrett <sean(a)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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