Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@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.
Steve
Unfortunately, that's easier said than done -- "child-safe" and "worksafe" are concepts that are impossible to define in a way that everyone can agree on. What one parent or community regards as acceptable may be unacceptable in another; what a parent wants their ten-year-old child to be able to see will probably differ from what they want their sixteen-year-old child to be able to see, and so on.
For some examples of edge cases: consider pictures of men wearing shorts, which are regularly banned by the censors in some of the more conservative Middle-Eastern states: do we mark all articles showing images of uncovered arms or legs as "unsafe"? How about pictures of women with uncovered hair? Do we mark the [[Holocaust]] article, which is extremely upsetting, as "unsafe" for children to read? How about [[death]], which is upsetting for very small children? What about pictures of [[Bahá'u'lláh]], which observant Bahá'ís prefer not to see in public, or even in their own homes?
I recommend reading RFC 3675 for a full and detailed discussion of all the issues involved: its authors conclude that broad-brush attempts at content filtering as "ill considered [...] from the legal, philosophical, and particularly, the technical points of view."
Rather than attempting to define "safe" and "unsafe" categories, we should instead concentrate on assigning all Wikipedia articles to meaningful fine-grained descriptive categories, without any implied judgment that a category is "safe" or "unsafe" for any given viewer. Downstream users who want to filter Wikipedia's content can then use this information to make their own choices.
-- Neil