On 29/03/06, Geoff Burling <llywrch(a)rdrop.com>
wrote:
It should be a straightforward task for any
computer technician to create
a filter to keep out all of the articles marked [[Category:Sex]],
[[Category:Porn star]], & even [[Category:Pokemon]], if a school or
workplace desires. Explicit metatags duplicate information that is
already part of the article & thus is unneeded -- unless some person
starts making contributions that confuse this categorization, for example
adding pictures of naked bodies to articles like [[Triangle]] & [[George
W. Bush]]. In that case these edits would be vandalism & dealt with
accordingly.
Smart one. We also have the nice (though oddly motivated) people
who've put together little galleries of all the nekkid pictures on
Wikipedia. It'd be a little tricker, but certainly not impossible, to
come up with on-the-fly page filtering based on the inclusion of those
images, or by sporadically generating Special:Whatlinkshere
references, or something...
This is stuff we're already doing. Regardless of the merits of
actually including filtering aids, tagging images and so on, it might
be worth creatively thinking about how someone can use features
already present in the live version to come up with filtering *at
their end*.
Thanks. It's clearly something for our ambassadors to say when a
jourmalist repeats the claim that Wikipedia has this collection of
pr0n beneath the surface. Say, along the lines of "I'm not aware of
that allegation, & while I doubt its accuracy anyone concerned can
easily filter out objectionable material by looking at the article's
category."
But what puzzles me is how did my email end up becoming nothing
more than an attachment of a perl script? Those in the know can
contact me off-list.
Geoff