(long message - gist in paragraph below hyphens)
Christopher Mahan wrote:
Perhaps not, in fact, because the majority of people in the world want an unbiased source, and almost everyone knows that education material is biased. Being banned from schools might actually be to the project's benefit.
Mff. I go to a school. I want Wikipedia there.
If educational material is biased, all the more reason for an NPOV Wikipedia available from schools to independently verify the story given to us from the textbooks. And [[There is no Cabal]] of teachers intentionally giving us biased facts. I think I'm missing your logic somehow - could you explain how it would help the 'pedia if it were banned from schools?
Dante Alighieri wrote:
Yes, if [[felching]] gets us banned from schools, that is a problem... for the schools. I don't really see it as a problem for us. The schools lose out on a source of information that, in my opinion, is unparalleled in its usefulness.
...
I'm sorry, but if other people want to censor information from themselves and children in their charge, that's /their/ problem, not ours.
Thus I'd lose out on a source of information - and many other student Wikipedians, I'm sure. Are we the students not considered part of us the Wikipedians? (That sounds gramatically strange...is it right?) If there's a sane way to help students - those whose present role in society is to learn (note that Wikipedia's role is to teach) - we should try to help the students rather than blame the bureaucrats.
--
Let me propose a content filtering system: a <filterable level= "low","high">...</filterable> meta-tag. Unregistered users would have level="high"-surrounded information removed - like an HTML <!--comment-->. Registered users would see all information, unless they set a User Prefs level of blocking (their choice). Registered users at a school, or registered parents, could ask an admin to block all <filterable>-marked content from their IP address/range. Level="low", therefore, is only for additional restrictions - user's own choice or IP range restriction - not for anonymous users. The name "filterable" is chosen to be NPOV: none doubt that [[genocide]] is filter/able/, that /some/ people /might/ filter it. We can later decide to add a why= attribute, with a few set categories and separate defaults/choices per why.
The reason we need a tag is for articles like [[Bill Clinton]] and [[breast]] - parents/schools may want parts of those articles blocked, but it's stupid to block the entire pages. Marking the (in)appropriate sections with a tag would solve the problem.
If an entire article or significant portion of one is blocked, we could print a message in place of the content, asking users to log in/register to view restricted content or (if under an IP restriction) log in/register and leave a message for an admin, who will contact the person who originally requested the block (to verify it should be removed). (Yes, even logged-in users from a restricted IP address/range still wouldn't see filterable content - parents won't want their kids creating accounts to flout the ban.)
We can filter various amounts with this tag: single words (maybe have an alt="replacement" attribute?), links to other problematic articles/sites, sections, comments on talk pages, or, of course, an entire article from top to bottom. Using a separate database field would only allow the last situation.
I also think this system solves the POV problem by being APOV - the authorities' point of view - when the 'pedia _must_ take a point of view. The APOV is, after all, the only thing that matters when there are authorities with a POV, anyway.
I know some will say there'll be edit wars over what might be censorable, so we shouldn't implement this plan. By the same argument one could much more easily say we shouldn't allow capital letters for there _are_ edit wars on capitalization. And content filtering seems to me a more important issue than bird capitalization.
And sorry for the long message.
-Geoffrey Thomas [[User:Geoffrey]] "The quickest bans in Wikipedia are reserved for those who do not maintain the neutral point of view in times of great edit wars." ;-)
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--- Geoffrey Thomas geoffreyerffoeg@yahoo.com wrote:
Christopher Mahan wrote:
Perhaps not, in fact, because the majority of people in the world want an unbiased source, and almost everyone knows that education material is biased. Being banned from schools might actually be to the project's benefit.
Mff. I go to a school. I want Wikipedia there.
If educational material is biased, all the more reason for an NPOV Wikipedia available from schools to independently verify the story given to us from the textbooks. And [[There is no Cabal]] of teachers intentionally giving us biased facts. I think I'm missing your logic somehow - could you explain how it would help the 'pedia if it were banned from schools?
The most effective and deadly weapons are banned from civilian hands (Armored personnel vehicles, Combat aircraft, heat-guided rocket launchers, grenades, C-4, full-auto M-16s (the list goes on)), and they are the ones professionals prefer, because of their effectiveness in their intended area of use.
Likewise the W, as a comprehensive resource of unbiased, in-depth, well-referenced and pored over the world over tool of learning and referencey, would make any entity that is unconfortable with anthing except their own version of the truth du jour wish to curtail its use among the more tender member of its society.
I would rather the W become famous among leading geneticists and PHDs in history than among 9 graders.
I would *like* 9 graders to be able to use it, but not at the expense of seeming to the rest of the world to be a water-pistol in a world of precision-guided munition.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
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The first two paragraphs you wrote seem to suggest that the knowledge in Wikipedia is two dangerous for ordinary school children like Geoffrey and I, and the next paragraphs explain that that's not the case, it's just that we are insignifigant.
I think neither is the case. We schoolkids should have the right to use wikipedia, and that should be high on our list of priorities. I think we should impliment the system of categorization suggested wherin each article can be categorized as "sexually contravercial", "religiously contravercial," etc. There could also be some other website where these pages classified as contravercial were these were by default blocked, say, edupedia.org (open, i checked), and it would operate off of the same database. Maybe also all editing and talk pages would be blocked, as schools would think students shouldn't be editing an encycloprdia. I see nothing wrong with this idea except extra work for categorization and programming, but that is a considerable problem. If necessary, I could pay for the domain name.
--LittleDan
Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com wrote: The most effective and deadly weapons are banned from civilian hands (Armored personnel vehicles, Combat aircraft, heat-guided rocket launchers, grenades, C-4, full-auto M-16s (the list goes on)), and they are the ones professionals prefer, because of their effectiveness in their intended area of use.
Likewise the W, as a comprehensive resource of unbiased, in-depth, well-referenced and pored over the world over tool of learning and referencey, would make any entity that is unconfortable with anthing except their own version of the truth du jour wish to curtail its use among the more tender member of its society.
I would rather the W become famous among leading geneticists and PHDs in history than among 9 graders.
I would *like* 9 graders to be able to use it, but not at the expense of seeming to the rest of the world to be a water-pistol in a world of precision-guided munition.
===== Christopher Mahan
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LittleDan wrote in part:
I think we should impliment the system of categorization suggested wherin each article can be categorized as "sexually contravercial", "religiously contravercial," etc. There could also be some other website where these pages classified as contravercial were these were by default blocked, say, edupedia.org (open, i checked), and it would operate off of the same database.
I think that a good solution would be along these lines. We might revive the sifter project, not for Larry's purpose, but for this (of course the generic plan would work for both). Then Edupedia can be a sifted version of Wikipedia, operating according to guidelines set by LittleDan et al.
The best part is that what was being developed at sifter wouldn't involve editing the Wikipedia database at all, thus avoiding potential charges of POV in that database. Since Edupedia is the site with a POV (though in just one respect), it should hold the database, which would simply say, for each Wikipedia (or En.Wikipedia) article, what categories that article has for potential blocking. (This would be the reverse of the sifter project, which would have a database indicating which articles are accepted.) Then LittleDan and his supporters can set those policies without besmirching (in some opinions) Wikipedia's NPOV.
I believe that Jimbo has said in the past that he'd be willing to pay for such auxiliary projects. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) And edupedia.org is definitely a cool domain for it!
-- Toby