[WikiEN-l] Re: Filtering, etc.

[Geoffrey Thomas]

(long message - gist in paragraph below hyphens)

Christopher Mahan wrote:
>Perhaps not, in fact, because the majority of people in the world
>want an unbiased source, and almost everyone knows that education
>material is biased. Being banned from schools might actually be to
>the project's benefit.

Mff. I go to a school. I want Wikipedia there.

If educational material is biased, all the more reason for an NPOV
Wikipedia available from schools to independently verify the
story given to us from the textbooks. And [[There is no Cabal]]
of teachers intentionally giving us biased facts. I think I'm
missing your logic somehow - could you explain how it would
help the 'pedia if it were banned from schools?

Dante Alighieri wrote:
>Yes, if [[felching]] gets us banned from schools, that is a
>problem... for the schools. I don't really see it as a problem for
>us. The schools lose out on a source of information that, in my
>opinion, is unparalleled in its usefulness.
...
>I'm sorry, but if other people want to censor information from
>themselves and children in their charge, that's /their/ problem,
>not ours.

Thus I'd lose out on a source of information - and many other student
Wikipedians, I'm sure. Are we the students not considered part of
us the Wikipedians? (That sounds gramatically strange...is it right?)
If there's a sane way to help students - those whose present role
in society is to learn (note that Wikipedia's role is to teach) - we
should try to help the students rather than blame the bureaucrats.

--

Let me propose a content filtering system: a <filterable level=
"low","high">...</filterable> meta-tag. Unregistered users would
have level="high"-surrounded information removed - like an HTML
<!--comment-->. Registered users would see all information,
unless they set a User Prefs level of blocking (their choice).
Registered users at a school, or registered parents, could ask
an admin to block all <filterable>-marked content from their IP
address/range. Level="low", therefore, is only for additional
restrictions - user's own choice or IP range restriction - not
for anonymous users. The name "filterable" is chosen to be NPOV:
none doubt that [[genocide]] is filter/able/, that /some/ people
/might/ filter it. We can later decide to add a why= attribute,
with a few set categories and separate defaults/choices per why.

The reason we need a tag is for articles like [[Bill Clinton]]
and [[breast]] - parents/schools may want parts of those articles
blocked, but it's stupid to block the entire pages. Marking the
(in)appropriate sections with a tag would solve the problem.

If an entire article or significant portion of one is blocked,
we could print a message in place of the content, asking
users to log in/register to view restricted content or (if under
an IP restriction) log in/register and leave a message for
an admin, who will contact the person who originally requested
the block (to verify it should be removed). (Yes, even logged-in
users from a restricted IP address/range still wouldn't see
filterable content - parents won't want their kids creating
accounts to flout the ban.)

We can filter various amounts with this tag: single words
(maybe have an alt="replacement" attribute?), links to other
problematic articles/sites, sections, comments on talk pages,
or, of course, an entire article from top to bottom. Using
a separate database field would only allow the last situation.

I also think this system solves the POV problem by being APOV -
the authorities' point of view - when the 'pedia _must_ take a point
of view. The APOV is, after all, the only thing that matters when
there are authorities with a POV, anyway.

I know some will say there'll be edit wars over what might be
censorable, so we shouldn't implement this plan. By the same
argument one could much more easily say we shouldn't allow
capital letters for there _are_ edit wars on capitalization.
And content filtering seems to me a more important issue than
bird capitalization.

And sorry for the long message.

-Geoffrey Thomas [[User:Geoffrey]]
"The quickest bans in Wikipedia are reserved for those who do not maintain the neutral point of
view in times of great edit wars." ;-)

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