Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Of course we do risk 'flagging wars' -- but that's par for the course -- we risk 'edit wars' and so on all the time. The best way to minimize such wars is to approach tagging *as NPOV meta-data*.
But one of the main tools we use to come to NPOV -- 'going meta' -- isn't really available here.
Sure it is. We may not agree about the appropriateness of [[felching]], but we can agree that it's controversial, that it's sexual in nature, and that it would be widely regarded as a mature topic. There's probably a lot of other things we could say about it that would be relevant from a content advisory point of view, but which are also NPOV.
If we were writing disclaimers at the top of some pages, we would require the disclaimer to be NPOV. We wouldn't say "This page is bad for children." And we wouldn't say "Anyone who doesn't let children read this is a stick in the mud." We would say "Some may consider this page inappropriate for children."
'Going meta' isn't just saying 'some people think this', it's describing who thinks it. If we have to decide how many people should hold an opinion before a flag is set then I think we really will get 'wars' of back-and-forth reversions.
Then we have to think carefully about just what the flags mean, and just how we might make it possible for them to be NPOV.
Here's a set of flags that I think would work well enough for the felching article:
sexuality mature content slang
I don't see how those are very controversial.
--Jimbo