(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.
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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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