--- Jimmy Wales jwales@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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