[WikiEN-l] Just to throw this out there...

[Daniel Mayer]

>....
>Someone at TiVo might have argued thusly: "People should 
>watch a variety of shows, and not be such prudes, or such 
>anti-capitalists, or such anti-religionists.  They should keep 
>all channels accessible at all times.  So we must not build into 
>the system any tools to allow people to "filter".  If they want 
>filters, they can build their own device for doing it.  But we 
>aren't going to help."
>
>That'd be silly.  And it's just as silly for us to not flag content
>with some meta-data, even if we think people are silly 
>(and I don't) for using it.
>
>--Jimbo

For the sake of having a sane discussion can we avoid the use of the "f-word" 
please? "Filtering" has a bad name and is almost always something that is 
done to "protect" impressionable eyes by excluding only certain types of 
material (and often blocks legit things such as websites on brest cancer and 
safe sex). I for one get a bad taste in my mouth each time I hear the word.

"Sorting", however, is a database thing and doesn't have the negative 
connotations of the "f-word." I would like to sort Wikipedia based on a wide 
range of categories and have a Recent Changes that only displayed certain 
article categories and had the option to explicity not show others. This is 
needed anyway to prevent information overload.

The default should always be to show /everything/ though - it is not our place 
to make a value judgment on what a user would include or exclude in their 
*own* preferences. It should be up to them, not us, to make choices that suit 
their own likes and dislikes.  

But disabling links in articles based on category sorting preferences may be 
too much of a strain on the database so there may be technical reasons 
limiting just how far we can go with this - at least in the near term before 
donation and grant money starts to flow-in from the Wikimedia Foundation 
(hint, hint on getting this set-up ;). Which is fine by me because I want to 
do this in a slow managed and thoughtful fashion if we are going to do it at 
all.  

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)