--- Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Daniel Ehrenberg littledanehren@yahoo.com wrote:
For wikipedia to be an valid educational source,
it
needs to have some kind of approval system. From
what
I understand, this has been discussed since Day 1
of
Wikipedia, but I think it is time to impliment it.
If
wikipedia is ever to be printed or used in
schools, it
must be scrutinized and validated (or invalidated)
on
an article-by-article basis.
you mean the way google results are?
Sorry for being flippant, but isn't our process, worldwide and by real experts actually better and less prone to ceonsorship than state-sponsored child-proofing committees?
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell
Indeed, a search for clitoris on Google brings up much worse results, but a search for peryonie's disease brings up no pictures or diagrams whatsoever on the condition. We need to stay somewhere in the middle.
I'm sorry for the comment on my previous post; when I talk about wikipedia in schools, I usually try to think realistically. But you have a point. Maybe Wikipedia needs to be shown to schools somehow. Google and the internet have demonstrated to be good educational resources; now we should do the same. There could be a side project, say, edu.wikipedia.org, that we would set aside for educational purposes, although not censored much, if at all (although porn is still not allowed). The goal would be to have 1000 articles simple enough for the 10-year-old interested in diseases to understand, yet still complete, and with no broken links. Then, we could have a sample for schools and educational institutions to look at, as a sample for when Wikipedia is complete. The small number of articles would keep each article in great shape, reducing the need for designated editing and approval commitees. The 1000 articles would each hold information previously spread over many articles, as many "real" encyclopedias do. There would be no rambot pages or anything made by a bot. Even though there would be only 1000 articles, an infinite number of redirect pages would be allowed. Would this plan work?
I change my opinion far too frequently.
--LittleDan
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