Ray Saintonge wrote:
not up to standards. They never stop trying. We
can't hope to convince
all school districts to not block us. On the other hand, the gratuitous
publicity always helps our cause. We only have to insist that they
spell the name correctly.
I am not at all sure that this sort of gratuitous publicity would help
our cause. Remember that the people on the "other side" are not
stupid. And it's pretty easy for an interested party to go through
wikipedia and find content that would be shocking to the majority of
parents in most suburban school districts.
Erik argued the other day that if anyone tries to filter wikipedia,
they will just look stupid, and that our power can do a lot to
discredit the idea of filtering. That argument gave me pause.
But here's the counterargument -- if Wikipedia has no protection at
all for some things that the majority of people would find, not just
mildly offensive, but shocking, *for children*, then we become the
perfect poster-child for the pro-filtering crowd.
They can put forward the argument: "Yes, it would be wonderful if we
lived in the kind of world where filtering the Internet for schools is
unnecessary. But here's a good example: a site that appears to be
innocent and harmless but which actually has graphic and explicit
depictions of highly unusual sex practices. We even found one photo
of female genetalia that was lifted directly from a porn site."
And many people will quite reasonably buy that argument. It's
actually a very good argument *for* filtering in schools, for anyone
other than a bunch of radical information libertarians such as many of
us here.
None of the above determines what we should do, of course, but I think
it does add some perspective to the debate.
Yup! And the greater the fuss by the administrator,
the more the kids
will be encouraged to hack their way to the site. Nevertheless, many
won't even bother with the school computers when they have more
sophisticated equipment at home.
That's of course true.
--Jimbo