[WikiEN-l] Re: Filtering, etc.

[Geoffrey Thomas]

groan...I have to retype this reply because I accidentally closed the window...

Christopher Mahan saith:
> --- Geoffrey Thomas <geoffreyerffoeg at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> The most effective and deadly weapons are banned from civilian hands
> (Armored personnel vehicles, Combat aircraft, heat-guided rocket
> launchers, grenades, C-4, full-auto M-16s (the list goes on)), and
> they are the ones professionals prefer, because of their
> effectiveness in their intended area of use.

Suppose you were designing a heat-guided launcher for profit. Would
you allow it only to launch rockets, and then be marketed solely
to professionals? Or would you instead enable launching water balloons
for the citizens, and allow rocket-mode for the professionals only?
For profit, I would choose the latter - more customers. But I'm still
not _destroying_ the rocket-launching mechanism. I'm _disabling_ it
for those who should only launch water-balloons. Same with the Wikipedia.
We don't need to _remove_ potentially "dangerous" content. We merely
need to _restrict_ it for those who shouldn't/wouldn't see it.

> Likewise the W, as a comprehensive resource of unbiased, in-depth,
> well-referenced and pored over the world over tool of learning and
> referencey, 

a what?? a "pored over the world over tool of learning and referencey"!?

>             would make any entity that is unconfortable with anthing
> except their own version of the truth du jour wish to curtail its use
> among the more tender member of its society.

So we _allow_ the truth du jour to show in Wikipedia, but block the truth
de la nuit*. Don't misunderstand me - I am fundamentally _not_ for censorship.
I just think we need proactive smart censorship to defend from dumb censorship
(think: school blocking software). If we want the Wikipedia to grow, we need
to make it available in as many places as we can - and a prime place is in
schools, whose role is, like the Wikipedia, to educate mankind.

*nuit=night, it's a word play/double-entendre

> I would rather the W become famous among leading geneticists and PHDs
> in history than among 9 graders.

How'd you guess my grade!?

To become famous among geneticists and Ph.D.'s, it must first become
famous among the ninth-graders. We grow up, you know, and we _are_ the
leading geneticists and Ph.D.'s twenty years hence. The more the general
knowledge we have, the more the specific knowledge we can in the future
learn - or create. Many famous persons in history have taught themselves
Latin, or calculus, or something of the sort at a young age. The Wikipedia
makes this easy. Opening it to 9th-graders will _increase_ the likelihood
of the Wikipedia becoming famous among the famous.

Yes, I said _opening_. Again, the point of self-censorship is to create
_more_ readership in the Wikipedia. No, this isn't some "war is peace"
backwards talk. Either we censor now or somebody will do it for us.

> I would *like* 9 graders to be able to use it, but not at the expense
> of seeming to the rest of the world to be a water-pistol in a world
> of precision-guided munition.

If we censor properly, do so only where necessary, not actually _remove_
content, and continue as we have been doing, we'll seem to the world like a
tachyon-positron-laser-beam-parallel-universe-three-second-destroyer in
contrast to ordinary, *boring* precision-guided munitions <yawn>. And yes, we'll
seem like water-pistols to students, but in a world of drippy faucets. At
least we won't be a disconnected faucet.

-[[User:Geoffrey]] Thomas

P.S. One of the reasons I'd like to censor is for my own preference, for
example, when looking at the articles [[User:Viking]] edited when a ban
was called for...and I realized suddenly what the articles were about...

P.P.S. What's Sifter, and is it relevant to this? Has any work been done
on that?

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