Axel Boldt wrote:
There's one question we haven't investigated yet: would our filtering really lower the likelihood that schools will eventually block us completely?
I have some experience with filtering software. For sites like ours, what is likely is that specific pages will be blocked automatically based on keyword analysis, but that the site as a whole will not.
I doubt that we could ever create a system that even comes close to preventing school kids from getting the Wikipedia content they want. At one point, a school administrator will find objectionable content in Wikipedia, will investigate the filtering option with the various categories, and will realize that kids can still get to the objectionable pages, e.g. by typing in the direct URL. Then our whole domain will be blocked.
Possibly, but it really depends on the software they are using.
Sometimes blocks are that crude, but more often, they are not.
--Jimbo