[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Anthony]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Tomasz Ganicz <polimerek at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2010/5/8 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
>
> > 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.
>
> So... are we now going to start writting "USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm)" ?
> There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and
> vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars,
> articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of
> things to be deleted in order to make our projects more "family
> friendy".
>

I don't know what you're going to do, but that's certainly not what I was
suggesting.  I was thinking more the content that's "educational" only to a
narrow niche of abnormal psychologists and/or medical professionals.

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Excirial <wp.excirial at gmail.com> wrote:

> Why do you believe that there is a need to make a "choice" between groups
> of people?


You agreed yourself that there were certain images that were "inappropriate
for children", but would be educational and/or informative for certain niche
professionals.  That sounds to me like a choice needs to be made.  It's just
like the choices that are made in every encyclopedia article on Wikipedia.
Present the topic in a way geared toward niche professionals, or present it
in a way geared toward the general public.  I wouldn't consider either
choice to be "censorship", not by any reasonable definition of the term.

We can easily supply all the data - it is up to the user to decide
> if they want to access it.
>

Supplying "all the data" and letting "the user" decide what they want to
access is not at all helpful.  A raw dump of facts is not helpful.  No,
choices have to be made in order to turn that raw dump of facts into an
educational resource.  And that means choosing your audience.

Am I saying that audience should be families, and there is no other
acceptable choice.  No, I'm not.  There are plenty of other acceptable
choices.



On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:

> For what it's worth, I personally don't see the issue as one of making
> Commons (or Wikipedia or any other project) "family-friendly."
>


> If we judge Commons content simply on the basis of "Does this content
> serves the mission of the projects?" there is no doubt that some content
> will removed, some offensive content will not be removed, and Commons will
> no longer be a kind of "dumping ground" for anything and everything
> regardless of whether content lacks encyclopedic usefulness.


I don't think so.  At least not by the standard deletion processes that are
currently in place.  Just about any content can be said to "contain
encyclopedic usefulness" if you take that to mean it could conceivably be
used for educational purposes by someone.  Even the most obscene and
information-lacking content can be argued to be "educational", if for no
other purpose than the purpose of giving an example of content which is
obscene and information-lacking (and moreover, I've seen these types of
arguments being made).  "Encyclopedic usefulness" is meaningless without
first defining your audience.

Yes, the term "family friendly" is often used to mean something akin to
"prudish christian conservative", but that's not the way I intended it.  I
intended it exactly the way it is written, content which is useful for
teaching within the context of a family.  That includes nudity, violence,
sex, and "Tank Man", all things which a family would be negligent in *not*
teaching their children about (or at least giving them the materials to
learn for themselves).

I didn't say anything about whether or not the images are "offensive".  The
idea that "family friendly" would mean "not offensive to anyone" is a
bastardization of the English language, not the terminology I was using.