[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[Andrew Gray]

On 4 September 2011 21:38, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes (maybe). It's not at all clear that this use case should not be
> ignored to avoid the possibility of compromising the encyclopedia.
>
> I have to ask: if there's such a demand for a censored Wikipedia,
> where are the third-party providers? Anyone? This is a serious
> question. Even workplace filtermakers don't censor Wikipedia, as far
> as I know.

It is worth noting here that even if they wanted to partially restrict
access to "live" Wikipedia, it would currently be impractical to do so
- there's no easy way of identifying all the problematic sections
other than with fairly haphazard keyword matching, meaning that it's
an all-or-nothing affair, and "all" is decidedly unpopular (though we
do hear of it sometimes).

As to why no-one is distributing a "filtered" version of Wikipedia, I
think that falls more under the general heading of "where are the
major third-party reusers that anyone actually cares about?" - the
non-existence of a commercial filtered version is less of a surprise
when we consider the dearth of commercial packaged versions at all...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk