Hi All,

I had a great time reading the blogpost. Very amusing. But had to clarify some things before we all pick up our pitch-forks and torches, so..

http://nikhilsheth.blogspot.com/2011/03/clarification-about-wfsoe-and-english.html

I can fully understand the knee-jerk mechanism of reading one email in haste and putting two unrelated things together to turn a totally open initiative (the main website is a wiki-page where anyone can give feedback if anything goes wrong or can jump in, give alternatives and change the course of the project for the better without any controlling powers blocking anybody) into a thrilling soap opera filled with villains preying on innocent children and destroying our sacred culture by showing them things we desperately do not want them to see like:

safe sex, condoms, facts about womens' bodies that would end their objectification and bring respect between the sexes, human rights abuses practiced by our government under the garb of AFSPA, truths about Naxalism, SEZ's and raping of the nation's resources and forests by industrialists that metro-dwellers don't want to admit, mass displacements caused by development projects that don't really tip the cost-benefit scales in the long run, ties of all major mainstream media with establishment and corporates that prevents real news from being printed or broadcast, that Santa Claus doesn't really exist, that our and other governments are doing lip service about mass-killer threats of climatic disruption while blowing vast amounts on things like CWG, scandals and scams, ugly track records of most politicians in our country, etc etc.

I fully understand that we should be really really scared of any of these uncomfortable truths that are anyways present in wikipedia open for all to see (and not any porn or racy material as we try to blanket them under when using the term "objectionable content") from ever reaching the millions of children on the other side of the digital and economic divide whom we don't really give a damn about anyways.
And I completely agree we should always guard against such threats to our society rather than actually risking empowering the people with knowledge of the world they are living in.

btw, personal opinions do not influence practicality. As I've explained in the reply-blog-post, Ain't no way the unfiltered versions are getting anywhere near any students as long as the initiative remains grass-roots and no one is ordering any school from top. Before any of you start to even worry about content, the teachers and staff themselves audit it fully before allowing it, being directly responsible. So I'd advise the community to stop worrying so much and instead get to work on actually creating student-friendly indian language versions that have a little more than 500 articles.

What I cannot understand is how in the world can anybody expect a made-for-education collection of wikipedia articles for school children from age 8 to 17 that is supposed to cover everything they'll learn through school to actually fit on just one little CD!! :P

And then after that fact how is one supposed to magically squeeze in porno and what not into the same CD to make it unfit for school children, even if we forget that the ZIM format isn't half as easily alterable as the other more "preferred" formats that our own community has developed !


Cheers
Nikhil
 

On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 7:54 PM, sankarshan <foss.mailinglists@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 5:31 PM, CherianTinu Abraham
<tinucherian@gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) Releasing Wikipedia CD for School and school children needs larger review
> of content. Not all content on Wikipedia may be suitable for children. If
> any such controversy occurs on content on Wikipedia to children, we may risk
> a very bad reputation and possibly permanent ban of them from schools.

Somewhat tangential, the OLPC folks had also worked on providing a
dump of Wikipedia. Is there a way to access the criteria used to
curate the content suitable for children ?

--
sankarshan mukhopadhyay
<http://sankarshan.randomink.org/blog>

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