Ray Saintonge wrote:
not up to standards. They never stop trying. We can't hope to convince all school districts to not block us. On the other hand, the gratuitous publicity always helps our cause. We only have to insist that they spell the name correctly.
I am not at all sure that this sort of gratuitous publicity would help our cause. Remember that the people on the "other side" are not stupid. And it's pretty easy for an interested party to go through wikipedia and find content that would be shocking to the majority of parents in most suburban school districts.
Erik argued the other day that if anyone tries to filter wikipedia, they will just look stupid, and that our power can do a lot to discredit the idea of filtering. That argument gave me pause.
But here's the counterargument -- if Wikipedia has no protection at all for some things that the majority of people would find, not just mildly offensive, but shocking, *for children*, then we become the perfect poster-child for the pro-filtering crowd.
They can put forward the argument: "Yes, it would be wonderful if we lived in the kind of world where filtering the Internet for schools is unnecessary. But here's a good example: a site that appears to be innocent and harmless but which actually has graphic and explicit depictions of highly unusual sex practices. We even found one photo of female genetalia that was lifted directly from a porn site."
And many people will quite reasonably buy that argument. It's actually a very good argument *for* filtering in schools, for anyone other than a bunch of radical information libertarians such as many of us here.
None of the above determines what we should do, of course, but I think it does add some perspective to the debate.
Yup! And the greater the fuss by the administrator, the more the kids will be encouraged to hack their way to the site. Nevertheless, many won't even bother with the school computers when they have more sophisticated equipment at home.
That's of course true.
--Jimbo