Le 18/03/2015 20:41, Marc A. Pelletier a écrit :
On 15-03-18 02:19 PM, Mathias Damour wrote:
[...] the content must be appropriate for children [...]
The problem is exactly that. What is or is not "appropriate for children" is an inherently *political* question, the answer to which is inherently culture- religion- and governement-centric. What *you* define as "appropriate" is absolutely different from what *I* would - illustrated by the very concept of believing that there /is/ such a thing as "not appropriate for children" to begin with.
It still seems odd to me that those considerations would be some prevailing reason NOT to develop such a resource. In the same time, we have to take it as a fact and it can be a reason why the WMF may not be the appropriate organization to host and promote such wikis, being immersed in a certain climate surrounding children.
I quoted above the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which was not ratified by the US. One of the reason for that may be a conception of the rights of the parents to control what their children can be taught or the information they can reach, which would be slightly more extended in the US than in the average country. I mean rights of the parents against the rights of the government and against the eventual rights of the children to "seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds", be it very resembling to the "freely share in the sum of all knowledge - empower people..."
That would be the ground for a tacit policy I've heard of on en.wp that would be "don't tell us you are a minor". The basis of Simple English Wikipedia are also resembling it : "don't tell it's for children" (and consequently it isn't really for children).
Undoubtedly it doesn't prevent people from the US, among other countries, to be involved in and to benefit from such a resource. And the chapters may be more suited to support such a project/resource. Several of them already do.
For instance, would a Russian Kids' Wikipedia carefully avoid "promotion of homosexuality" as their law now demands (to pick one salient example amongst thousands).
There is not thousands examples, this kind af question is definitely not a day-to-day issue on Vikidia in French. There is so much to write on other subjects.
There /are/ thousand of examples unless Vikidia is a 1:1 map to the French Wikipedia with no selection or curation. Every single article that has not been included is a political statement, and raises a question about its propriety.
That you think that "this kind of question" is not a day-to-day issue on Vikidia simply means that you are presuming the answer - otherwise there would be nothing to curate.
Vikidia is not a selection or curation, it's about writing new articles which are independent from their counterpart on Wikipedia in the same language. Otherwise we couldn't meet the objective to be more affordable for children. However we make it easy by interwiki links to reach the Wikipedia article on the same subject if one want to know more about it. Some article are even longer on Vikidia than their counterpart on Wikipédia, such as : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/%C3%8Atre_vivant
Does it mean that projects like Vikidia are not valid and should not exist? No. It is perfectly allowable for any group (including groups of volunteers) to pick and curate some fraction of our projects for their use and according to their criteria. In fact, we should *encourage* such reuse.
It *does* mean that it is not apropriate for the projects to create or endorse such political endeavors, however.
-- Mathias Damour https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Astirmays https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Astirmays