James D. Forrester wrote:
On Thursday, February 24, 2005 5:36 PM, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
Stan Shebs said:
Even though we ourselves might not want a bowdlerized WP, it would be extraordinarily convenient to have some kind of subset quasi-mirror that advertised themselves as "child-safe".
Absolutely. This is what I've been proposing for some time.
Indeed. It's called "Wikipedia 1.0", and /that/ can have filtering and whathaveyou as much as you want, with a "child-friendly" default (whatever that is).
Actually, I don't think the filtering is something that a Foundation sponsored organization can be involved with. As the discussion here has demonstrated, there isn't a single global standard of decency and propriety, so any single filtered "1.0" is going to be a problem for somebody, and probably lots of somebodies. A 1.0 that seems good for the UK will likely be treated with horror in Jesusland, and vice versa.
To abuse the Linux analogy some more, Linus just works on his kernel, and he doesn't try to tell people that, say, Red Hat is the *real* Linux distro. WP trying to come out with a single encyclopedia deemed suitable for all schools is just going to open up the mother of all edit wars, as each community feels compelled to enforce its standard on every other one in the world. Better to let independent groups develop their own postprocessing rules, while WP itself expresses no position favoring one over the other. If parents and schools in Missouri want a fully-clothed WP, then they should be willing to do the work - or contract it out - rather than forcing people on the other side of the world to follow their norms.
There really is a significant business opportunity here, and it can be accomplished perfectly without disrupting any of WP's ongoing operations or making editors do things they think are wrong.
Stan