[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Excirial]

Why do you believe that there is a need to make a "choice" between groups of
people? We can easily supply all the data - it is up to the user to decide
if they want to access it. Anyone active on the internet has the potential
to unearth vast amounts of data. There are pro-choice and pro-life sites,
there are sites about every religion, There are extremely left and extremely
right winged pages. There are pages encouraging suicide, anorexia, bulimia
and i can go on and on. Virtually everything related to humanity can be
found in the 500 petabytes or so of data we have networked together. If you
wish to find something, you can.

However, If i am not looking for a page about anorexia or bulimia, *I will
not find it*; or at least not on Wikipedia. If i don't want to see a picture
on a page, i can block it - See depictions of muhammed for an example. We -
or at least i - are not here to appease to a certain group. We are
collectively collecting data and transforming that into valid information -
as much as we can. We don't withhold or censor information simply because
some random group of people doesn't want to see or read it. We should
practice biomimicry - we won't evolve into the best source for a certain
task, but we evolve into the best source for all tasks combined. And that
means that if i search for "Penis", i will find an article about it, and
that article will likely be illustrated with a diagram or image. Why?
Because a image describes the subject better then words can do. If that
offends me, i should not be searching in the first place. Take the images on
our gangrene <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangrene> page. They are in my
eyes nauseating and not child friendly, but without them i would not be able
to form an understanding of the subject. But the point is - don't search,
don't find. Any child can safely search sesame street without ever finding
pornographic content on Wikipedia.

And frankly, if we are going to appease a certain group or censor ourselves
we will head into the direction of Conservapedia, which only offers
incomplete information that only little people can use. If anything we
should be aware of possible issues. As i said before, there is no reason to
offend just to offend, so controversial topics and images should be handled
with care. There is no need to have explicit images all over the place, but
they should be present in article's which talk about them.
~Excirial

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:40 PM, Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org> wrote:

> On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Excirial <wp.excirial at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Sexual and medical images might be entirely inappropriate for children,
> but
> > they provide valuable information for other groups of people - for
> example,
> > a gynecologist or a medical student might have a completely non sexual
> > reason to look at certain content. Protecting one group might well mean
> > that
> > we deny valuable data to another.
> >
>
> So which group is more important?  Which is the better answer, to tell
> families to go elsewhere, or to tell the specialists to go elsewhere?
>
> I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly,
> and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources.
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