[Foundation-l] Spectrum of views (was Re: Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening)

[Excirial]

*"The trick is to find a compromise which pleases both factions, or at
least upsets both equally."
*
If we generalize the situation we could state the following:
The *Libertarians *point of view could be worded as: "Allow everyone to view
all content"
The *Conservative *point of view could be worded as: "Disallow everyone to
view objectionable content"

The difference here is that the *Libertarian *side would allow everyone a
choice in the matter (Don't want to see? Don't search), while the *Conservative
*side denies everyone access ("Want to see? You cannot"). As a result i
would say that the conversative opinion is the weaker one, as it would
intend to force its point of view on another group while the libertarian
view allows the conservative group to make a choice whether or not they want
to view content. The only middle ground i can see would be allowing the
conservative user to block images they do not wish to see, as that only
influences their own experience, and not the experience of others.

*In particular, I think there is potential for some very shaky and
tentative common ground, in the area of parental control over young
children. Libertarians might be convinced to make an exception to
their principles for that case, which would open up room for small but
valuable concessions to conservatives.
*
How would you wish to create or control such a system? How can we "*Know*"
what users are young children? Any IP might represent someone under the age
of 18, and any IP could actually be a child that qualifies as "very young".
The only indication we might have are school IP's. I would point out that i
have heard of no school that allows unsupervised and unfiltered Internet
access to very young children. Furthermore i would (again) point out that i
would have to search for an explicit term in order to find one. Even if we
block Wiki access to such content there are a million other sides providing
the exact same thing.

What other options do we have? We could of course create a censor system
that allows network administrators to choose what content they refuse to
display, but such a system would only encourage true censorship as it might
be employed by ISP's and governments as well for very different reasons then
protecting children. And what difference would it make in the first place?
It would still fail to work for non school IP's such as home connections,
and not every school has an outbound address they can easily control. Sure,
the US and Europe generally connect schools trough dedicated IP's, but not
every country or school does so. The effect of such a system would be
trivial at best.

The last option we have is a per-user controlled settings that will hide
certain content. While i see some advantages with such a system (Eg: It
would hit no one besides a particular user), it would not solve the issue at
hand. Children are unlikely to create accounts to merely view wikipedia,
which would mean that parent would have to control settings on an IP basis.
And surprise - IP's are often dynamic which renders those changes void.

Don't get me wrong. I am not entirely adverse to your statement that parent
should be able to control what young children see, but i see no reasonable
way to implement that.

*To summarize:*
- We cannot reliably filter young users, as every IP might be a child.
Therefor we can not possibly create a catch-all system
- There are other technical and social factors that make such a system
undesirable in the first place.
- Don't search, don't find. And even if we hide wikipedia's content there
are plenty of other results that don't care who looks at them
- Removing content altogether would prevent anyone from seeing it, while
keeping content would allow people who wish to see it to look. A side that
enforces it opinion over anotheris par definition the weaker side in a
debate.

~Excirial

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> On 11/05/10 23:56, Mike Godwin wrote:
> > That's a feature, not a bug. If there is a compromise that "pleases" some
> > factions but not others, it's not exactly a compromise, is it?
>
> The trick is to find a compromise which pleases both factions, or at
> least upsets both equally.
>
> In particular, I think there is potential for some very shaky and
> tentative common ground, in the area of parental control over young
> children. Libertarians might be convinced to make an exception to
> their principles for that case, which would open up room for small but
> valuable concessions to conservatives.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
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