Fred Bauder wrote:
How much truth is there to this:
The Parents for the Online Safety of Children (POSC) organization is
worried about parents letting their children into a website that is a
known gathering for pedophiles. Any pedophile can easily obtain a
child's IP address and use it to locate the child's place of
residence outside of the internet. Pedophiles may also solicit
children for sex or attempt to contact them through using WikiPedia
as a medium, or even find out their e-mail address or instant
messenger screen name.
We do still encourage everyone to become a registered user, in which
case the children's IP addresses are not public knowledge. The first
step in internet safety is what the child does to protect himself. He
should not register himself anywhere under his real name. Wikipedia is
only one site, but an inventive pedophile can use any site to lure
children. The more obscure ones are likely to be more effective.
Parents who engage in that kind of whining would probably serve their
kids best if they first understood what they were talking about. Many
of them may not even know how to turn a computer on. The kids can see
right through that, and those parents soon lose all credibility in the
eyes of their own kids who promptly do the opposite of what they're told.
Since WikiPedia allows pedophiles to edit WikiPedia
pages and view
the IP addresses of children freely, we recommend that you use
filtering software to block WikiPedia from access in your household
or school.
When the parent doesn't understand computers he can always get the kids
to help with the software installation. ;-)
The internet is already a dangerous lurking ground for
pedophiles;
statistics show that about 1 in 5 children are solicited for sex
online, and with the growth of the unregulated WikiPedia, that number
can only skyrocket.
"Lies, damn lies, and statistics ..." with a little non-sequitur for
flavour. We now require material to be sourced; do they?
Since WikiPedia refuses to address the issue of
pedophiles within its
ranks and the allowance of random editing to pages, we can only
recommend parents to withhold access to
WikiPedia.org for the time
being.
Simply banning identified pedophiles doesn't help the kids. You can
always keep an eye on the identified ones. The really dangerous one are
the ones who have not been identified at all.
Excerpts from
http://news.baou.com/main.php?
action=recent&msg_recent=&rid=20679
What can we practically do that would reduce any real risk? (I
exclude fighting among ourselves in a destructive way)
Providing accurate information about internet dangers that parents can
use to protect their children would be a positive step, but that has
limited value for people who are never online.
Ec