[WikiEN-l] Dangers to Children

[Steve Bennett]

Some key points that come to mind:
- It's not easy to get the ID of a user with a login name
- Wikipedia actively discourages off topic discussion. Anyone asking
for anyone's personal details or providing an email address would
generally be told off, whatever the context.
- Any nasty person would leave a huge electronic trail behind them
publicly visible to basically anyone.

Steve


On 2/6/06, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/6/06, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at ctelco.net> wrote:
> >What can we practically do that would reduce any real risk? (I exclude
> fighting among ourselves in a destructive way)
>
> Block anyone we see actively using talk pages to groom minors I guess.
> Personally I've never seen evidence of this and I can't imagine that any
> pedo would be dumb enough to do it in a public forum like that. I suppose
> there is some marginal risk that a pervert will meet a child through
> Wikipedia just by virtue of the fact that we are so highly trafficked and we
> permit user communication through our site, but there isn't much else we can
> do about it short of shutting the whole thing down. It's not our
> responsibility to raise people's children, and parents should know what
> their kids are doing on the internet.