On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Andrew Gray wrote:
On 29/03/06, Geoff Burling llywrch@rdrop.com wrote:
It should be a straightforward task for any computer technician to create a filter to keep out all of the articles marked [[Category:Sex]], [[Category:Porn star]], & even [[Category:Pokemon]], if a school or workplace desires. Explicit metatags duplicate information that is already part of the article & thus is unneeded -- unless some person starts making contributions that confuse this categorization, for example adding pictures of naked bodies to articles like [[Triangle]] & [[George W. Bush]]. In that case these edits would be vandalism & dealt with accordingly.
Smart one. We also have the nice (though oddly motivated) people who've put together little galleries of all the nekkid pictures on Wikipedia. It'd be a little tricker, but certainly not impossible, to come up with on-the-fly page filtering based on the inclusion of those images, or by sporadically generating Special:Whatlinkshere references, or something...
This is stuff we're already doing. Regardless of the merits of actually including filtering aids, tagging images and so on, it might be worth creatively thinking about how someone can use features already present in the live version to come up with filtering *at their end*.
Thanks. It's clearly something for our ambassadors to say when a jourmalist repeats the claim that Wikipedia has this collection of pr0n beneath the surface. Say, along the lines of "I'm not aware of that allegation, & while I doubt its accuracy anyone concerned can easily filter out objectionable material by looking at the article's category."
But what puzzles me is how did my email end up becoming nothing more than an attachment of a perl script? Those in the know can contact me off-list.
Geoff