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