Someone identifying himself as thagudearbh@yahoo.co.uk writes:
I can see many parents banning their children from using it - to the detriment of us all.
I never understand this argument, although it always seems to be advanced to excuse to repugnant bit of crusading.
If I shut the extraneous details of the crusade out of my mind, it always seems to come down to asking myself the following question:
What material effect would result from parents banning their children?
And obviously the answer is that more children would use Wikipedia. Wikipedia as Rock and roll.
So how could this be to the detriment of Wikipedia?
On 7/10/05, Tony Sidaway minorityreport@bluebottle.com wrote:
What material effect would result from parents banning their children?
Presumably they'd be hoping for the same effect intended by United States legislators who try to ban Darwin from the classrooms.
Tony Sidaway a écrit:
Someone identifying himself as thagudearbh@yahoo.co.uk writes:
I can see many parents banning their children from using it - to the detriment of us all.
I never understand this argument, although it always seems to be advanced to excuse to repugnant bit of crusading.
If I shut the extraneous details of the crusade out of my mind, it always seems to come down to asking myself the following question:
What material effect would result from parents banning their children?
And obviously the answer is that more children would use Wikipedia. Wikipedia as Rock and roll.
So how could this be to the detriment of Wikipedia?
I do not think it is to the detriment of Wikipedia proper, but yes, I do not allow my children to use Wikipedia by themselves. And I will not before a few years (until I really lose control on what they do on the net).
I do not qualify myself as a highly traditional and restrictive parent. Quite the opposite actually. But in three years, I saw enough image material on wikipedia, that I do not consider suitable for them to see now.
It may be that I am a minority *here*, but I also think parents are a minority amongst involved editors. I do not see it as detrimental to the encyclopedia; simply, Wikipedia as is is for adults, not for children. There is nothing wrong with this.
ant
A feature in Mediawiki to allow a preference for logged-in users to "Disable editing" could be useful. A password could be set for the preference, so it would be needed to re-enable editing. Schools could benefit from this, if they could set-up one account for the network. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Anthere" anthere9@yahoo.com To: wikien-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Sunday, July 10, 2005 7:13 PM Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: On parents banning their children from Wikipedia
Tony Sidaway a écrit:
Someone identifying himself as thagudearbh@yahoo.co.uk writes:
I can see many parents banning their children from using it - to the detriment of us all.
I never understand this argument, although it always seems to be
advanced
to excuse to repugnant bit of crusading.
If I shut the extraneous details of the crusade out of my mind, it
always
seems to come down to asking myself the following question:
What material effect would result from parents banning their children?
And obviously the answer is that more children would use Wikipedia. Wikipedia as Rock and roll.
So how could this be to the detriment of Wikipedia?
I do not think it is to the detriment of Wikipedia proper, but yes, I do not allow my children to use Wikipedia by themselves. And I will not before a few years (until I really lose control on what they do on the
net).
I do not qualify myself as a highly traditional and restrictive parent. Quite the opposite actually. But in three years, I saw enough image material on wikipedia, that I do not consider suitable for them to see
now.
It may be that I am a minority *here*, but I also think parents are a minority amongst involved editors. I do not see it as detrimental to the encyclopedia; simply, Wikipedia as is is for adults, not for children. There is nothing wrong with this.
ant
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 7/11/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
It may be that I am a minority *here*, but I also think parents are a minority amongst involved editors. I do not see it as detrimental to the encyclopedia; simply, Wikipedia as is is for adults, not for children.
You mean for using, rather than editing? 8^)
But yes, fully concur. Perhaps this ties in with the "writing for the audience" approach, and WP is very rarely written with children in mind. Start typing "rude words" into WP and you will definitely see material that is not "school-safe". Images or articles about violence and violent events can also pop up without a real lot of warning.
On 7/11/05, David 'DJ' Hedley spyders@btinternet.com wrote:
A feature in Mediawiki to allow a preference for logged-in users to "Disable editing" could be useful. A password could be set for the preference, so it would be needed to re-enable editing. Schools could benefit from this, if they could set-up one account for the network.
Something like this would be very handy. Any number of times I've looked through RC and found edit sequences that make me think a bunch of twelve year olds are sitting around library computers making rude comments about each other, just for the fun of having "Billy-Joe smells weird" appear on "thuh Internet".
But I'm not sure that this sort of thing can be stopped. You don't need to be logged in to make edits.
Skyring a écrit:
On 7/11/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
It may be that I am a minority *here*, but I also think parents are a minority amongst involved editors. I do not see it as detrimental to the encyclopedia; simply, Wikipedia as is is for adults, not for children.
You mean for using, rather than editing? 8^)
But yes, fully concur. Perhaps this ties in with the "writing for the audience" approach, and WP is very rarely written with children in mind. Start typing "rude words" into WP and you will definitely see material that is not "school-safe". Images or articles about violence and violent events can also pop up without a real lot of warning.
More precisely, my kids are 7 and 8. In terms of using, this is not only a question of unsuitable images, but simply that one does not explain things the same way to an adult than to an 8 years old. This is purely a question of maturity.
As for editing, my 8 years old has edited wikipedia. I fear it is quite unsuitable to edit as well at this age. It is a little bit too complicated. The interface is mostly done with a textual and uniform approach, while kids mostly like icons and colors. This is kinda boring for them. If we were making a wiki for young, we would need to simplify the interface and make it more friendly.
Naturally, their editing will have sentences of poor quality, many spelling and grammar mistakes, so is likely to irritate regular editors.
Finally, if there many great editors (and absolutely all were very very very nice to my son), there are also jerks running free. Kids have a lot of confidence and trust in adults, I do not think it is a good idea to let anyone free to influence them without any control. It is just not safe.
ant
On 7/11/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Finally, if there many great editors (and absolutely all were very very very nice to my son), there are also jerks running free. Kids have a lot of confidence and trust in adults, I do not think it is a good idea to let anyone free to influence them without any control. It is just not safe.
Hear hear!
Of course, this goes for the Internet as a whole - it's not just WP.
Obviously parental (or ILP) control is the way to go for children using WP. Short of having some sort of volunteer assistant program to help out identified child users, which would open any number of cans of worms.
Parents (or teachers etc.) are best placed to assist, instruct, guide and explain.
And what better Wiki-teacher than an editor? In fact, for some non-editor parents, I suspect that it might be the kids telling the parents how to use the technology!
My English teacher at my high school allows us to use Wikipedia. Of course, I come from a high school, not an elementary school.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Skyring skyring@gmail.com Date: Jul 10, 2005 2:12 PM Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: On parents banning their children from Wikipedia To: English Wikipedia wikien-l@wikipedia.org
On 7/11/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Finally, if there many great editors (and absolutely all were very very very nice to my son), there are also jerks running free. Kids have a lot of confidence and trust in adults, I do not think it is a good idea to let anyone free to influence them without any control. It is just not safe.
Hear hear!
Of course, this goes for the Internet as a whole - it's not just WP.
Obviously parental (or ILP) control is the way to go for children using WP. Short of having some sort of volunteer assistant program to help out identified child users, which would open any number of cans of worms.
Parents (or teachers etc.) are best placed to assist, instruct, guide and explain.
And what better Wiki-teacher than an editor? In fact, for some non-editor parents, I suspect that it might be the kids telling the parents how to use the technology!
-- Pete, who is beginning to think that his mobile phone is smarter than he is _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 7/18/05, Jesse the man viciouskatana.man@gmail.com wrote:
My English teacher at my high school allows us to use Wikipedia. Of course, I come from a high school, not an elementary school.
And here we have the question of just when children can be expected to act in a responsible and unsupervised manner. Do children all reach such a point at eighteen years of age? Any other arbitrary point?
My experience is that chidren become responsible at different ages, and at the risk of gross generalisation, it seems to me that girls grow up a lot earlier than boys.
Having a teacher decide whether students are adult enough to use (and edit) Wikipedia on their own sounds reasonable to me. In fact many high school students display breathtaking intelligence and insight and would be valued contributors.
It could equally be said that many adults should be supervised by someone responsible, judging by the sort of behaviour we so often see.