James D. Forrester wrote:
On Thursday, February 24, 2005 5:36 PM, Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport(a)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