On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 15:12:32 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
Karl A. Krueger said:
Trying to reach out to the censorious by dropping the nekkid pixx0r is a waste of time. They *don't care* if we have nekkid pixx0r or not; our evil is obvious in that we don't parrot their party line about whatever hot-button issue they fuss about.
Hear hear! I couldn't have put it better myself.
Let's not kid ourselves that Wikipedia will ever be suitable for schools. My son says his school blocked access to *any* site whose contents could be altered in realtime by people other than the site owners--that includes forums as well as Wikis. I can see their point and I think they're being very sensible. The grundies, on the other hand, are not going to be satisfied. The best we can do is limit the damage by admitting that no public Wiki can ever be considered child-safe. The kids will still come and read Wikipedia, and learn from it, but they'll do so with the thrill of transgression. This is not a bad thing. Wikis are, or should be, powerful weapons against ignorance. It's as well that we should not appease our natural enemies.
This problem is easily solved by producing Stikipedia.org as a static site drawn from Wikipedia but containing "sticky" articles that are the "last good state". If an article is edited, those articles need to be recertified in some fashion. Images (or potentially offensive text) could also be subject to special handling - maybe you have to register as an adult to see it or click on a warning button or something.
That way schools and parents could block Wikipedia with its graphic images, disturbing text, edit wars and vandalism, but depend upon Stikipedia. And, frankly, I'm not really sure I want millions of schoolchildren having edit access to Wikipedia, showing off by replacing an article on Constitutional History of the United States with "Billy is a poo poo head". Most kids wouldn't dream of doing this, but there's always one...
In fact, as I understand it, a third party could do this today. Register a site name, grab hold of the contents of Wikipedia, and put it all up for public consumption as a static site.