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Yes, what you say is true. However, PICS labelling (the ICRA stuff I suggested a few days ago) is an accepted W3C standard, supported by every filtering software there is. On the other hand, your solution would require the school to employ a skilled IT technician to reprogram the filtering software. It would be hard for a school to justify spending that amount of public money to give students safe access to one website - the most likely result is that the whole site will get blocked.
With PICS labels, however, individual Wikipedia pages would be automatically filtered by the settings of the filtering software.
Cynical
Geoff Burling wrote:
On Sun Mar 26 19:08:45 UTC 2006 Steve Bennett stevage at gmail.com wrote:
On 3/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
I find it very curious that of all the things they can attack wikipedia for, the fact that wikipedia is not censored is the one they focus on. Very strange indeed.
All the more reason to tag Wikipedia articles as kidsafe/worksafe.
It occurs to me that this entire debate about tagging articles is entirely moot. If a school or workplace wishes to filter Wikipedia content by articles, we have already provided the means for them to identify unwanted material: use the article category.
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.
The means to bar information on Wikipedia that is not safe for children & the workplace already exists. How they could make this work is thankfully not our concern.
Geoff
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