[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Michael Snow]

geni wrote:
> On 7 May 2010 20:30, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:
>   
>> Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
>> in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
>> no educational or informational value.
>>     
> Err the user namespace? the project namespace?
>   
Okay, to be clear about this, the focus of the statement is on the body 
of informational material, essentially the main namespace, which is what 
most people think of as the project. The statement needed to work for a 
very broad audience, so it didn't get into technical details like this. 
Material in other namespaces that serve a support function isn't 
expected to have direct educational value. Presumably it should have a 
support value to match its intended function, either in terms of 
advancing the project itself or improving the project community. As 
mentioned, the statement geenrally affirms established principles, and I 
think most projects have some sort of understanding about what's 
appropriate for other namespaces.
>> In saying this, we don't intend
>> to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that
>> already exists.  We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially
>> offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or
>> informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no
>> such value.
>>     
> Given the overwelming majority of projects have no such policy the
> statement would appear to be flawed. For example what policy would you
> suggests applies on be.wikipedia ?
>   
Is there some particular reason for using that as an example? Material 
that's considered outside the scope of a project gets removed by every 
community of which I'm aware, so I'm not sure which projects you mean. 
Granted, not all of them have matured to the point of needing to 
document various policies, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

--Michael Snow