Robert emailed me asking for an opinion, privately or publicly. At the
risk of another cycle ...
I can reiterate my basic argument, as father of a three-year-old and
stepfather of two teenagers.
The Wikimedia communities are sufficiently painstaking in making sure
everything is educational and in context that I'd happily let my
daughter in front of Wikimedia unrestricted. Anything sexual or
horrifying would be informative and in context.
The community works *incredibly hard* to make the contentious stuff
good. Any kid who looks up "fuck" on en:wp will come away considerably
educated, for example!
The last shock I got from en:wp was when I followed a link to
Wikipedia on another site to [[:en:Cock ring]], and was confronted
with a large, shiny, erect penis. With, of course, a cock ring on it.
Not something I'd care to have pop up on the screen at work ... on the
other hand, I have no reason to be going to an article on cock rings
at work. I think the article was entirely reasonable and the use of
the picture was entirely reasonable.
Then there is the issue of important photos of war and so on that are
*absolutely horrifying*. They should be in the encyclopedia, even if
merely describing some of them makes my stomach do flip-flops.
Basically: I think experience shows that the Wikimedia communities
take their responsibility to educate seriously enough that "Wikipedia
is not censored" is sufficient in practice. I have seen no cases that
would lead me to think otherwise.
As noted in the recent Muhammad image discussion, Wikimedia has a firm
bias to more information rather than less. It's right there in the
mission statement. This is why the community is here at all.
If you go against the mission statement, and the expectation with it
that more information is better than less information - even if the
information is horrible and shocking - the community will not accept
it. They will get up and *leave*. As Milos noted, implementing any of
the recommendations on that meta talk page will promptly lead to a
fork. As it should.
Filtering should be left to third parties. The SOS Children Wikipedia
for Schools is an excellent example, and it's quite popular and won't
get a teacher fired. Other than that, I've seen no evidence of actual
demand for a filtered Wikimedia from end users - only from people who
want to filter the projects themselves at the source.
- d.
