[WikiEN-l] Re: Filtering, etc.

[Anthere]

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at bomis.com> wrote:
> Dante Alighieri wrote:
> > I'm sorry, but if other people want to censor
> information from themselves 
> > and children in their charge, that's /their/
> problem, not ours. I don't see 
> > why we need to be held hostage to the Puritanical
> views of a few people out 
> > there who think that it would somehow be a
> disaster if a child read the 
> > felching article. Why do their work for them? If
> they want a filter, let 
> > /them/ write it. Let /them/ argue what it should
> filter. Let's leave 
> > Wikipedia just the way it is.
> 
> In what we are we held hostage just by including
> content metadata and
> allowing people a simple option for how they want to
> view the
> wikipedia?  I think such dramatic analogies would be
> appropriate if
> our only possible course of actions were to either
> self-censor or let
> it all hang out, but it seems to me that we have
> several promising
> alternatives that pose a useful compromise.
> 
> Again, I ask you to think not of schools and their
> issues, but of me
> and my issues.  I'm a modern person offended by
> almost nothing.  And
> yet, I wouldn't like to be showing my mother
> wikipedia and say, o.k.,
> here is how you edit, and over here is where people
> can see the recent
> changes, and OH MY!!, er, well, uh, really, this
> isn't about porn, ma.
> 
> --Jimbo

I understand your desire to protect your mother Jimbo,
but I don't see what your mother has to do with this.

I somehow read that here, you are suggesting that
articles flagged as porn along your mother principles,
are not to be seen in recent changes either ? This
will become very complicated then.

I see no "real problem" I guess with setting flags but
I definitly see one in defining which will be under
one flag or not.

The current editors will decide together what is
supposingly ok to most, and what is supposingly not
ok. But, how are these supposed to know what is
offensive in one culture and not offensive in another
? This is different in each culture, and each
situation. So that has to be defined accordingly, not
uniformally for every culture. 

I admit some might desire some sort of censorship
might be necessary for full access to knowledge along
certain standards of decency or whatever.

Say, if you want to propose an short-wikipedia to
american schools - such a wikiUSchildrenpedia set for
american education, you need certification teams
coherent with american education standards.

But, a wikiBritishchildrenpedia set for british
education might not require the same censorship
standards. Perhaps the definition of what is porn or
not porn will be different. Maybe some points not
acceptable for american will be acceptable by british
standards and reversely.

Each of these set of people need to define
*themselves* what is ok and what is not ok.

So, we need to provide *everything*, and that is
*their* job to decide to keep or not to keep the
information. Not our job. So we need to provide the
flagging system for an extracted wiki perhaps, but
certainly not to define the nature of the censorship ourselves.

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