[WikiEN-l] Re: One concern regarding filters

[martin at myreddice.freeserve.co.uk]

Eloquence> "By endorsing fair use, we defend this principle"

I'd prefer to defend the principle of open content. That's what's in Wikipedia's 
mission statement. We've come together, from diverse walks of life, with all kinds of 
mutually contradictory belief systems, and united around that goal. Let's not distract 
ourselves by bringing all kinds of other ideas. To my mind, we should evaluate 
everything by a single question - "What will help us achieve our goal of making a 
collaborative, online, accessible, open content, accurate, unbiased and 
comprehensive encyclopedia?".

If someone can convince me that content filters will help us, or hinder us, in that 
goal, then I'll listen carefully and "vote" accordingly. But arguments about protecting 
children, or how content filters should be scrapped, are irrelevant - I didn't sign on to 
Wikipedia to protect children, nor to scrap content filters. Tell me instead about how 
content filters will make Wikipedia more accessible, or how they will make Wikipedia 
less comprehensive. Tell me about how getting more children on Wikipedia will 
improve the possibilities for collaboration, or tell me how it's impossible to do content 
filtering in an unbiased way. Those are the arguments that are worth making...

Martin "MyRedDice" Harper