[WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day

[Neil Harris]

Steve Bennett wrote:
> On 3/26/06, Oskar Sigvardsson <oskarsigvardsson at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> I find it very curious that of all the things they can attack
>> wikipedia for, the fact that wikipedia is not censored is the one they
>> focus on. Very strange indeed.
>>     
>
> All the more reason to tag Wikipedia articles as kidsafe/worksafe.
>
> Steve
>
>   
Unfortunately, that's easier said than done -- "child-safe" and 
"worksafe" are concepts that are impossible to define in a way that 
everyone can agree on. What one parent or community regards as 
acceptable may be unacceptable in another; what a parent wants their 
ten-year-old child to be able to see will probably differ from what they 
want their sixteen-year-old child to be able to see, and so on.

For some examples of edge cases: consider pictures of men wearing 
shorts, which are regularly banned by the censors in some of the more 
conservative Middle-Eastern states: do we mark all articles showing 
images of uncovered arms or legs as "unsafe"? How about pictures of 
women with uncovered hair? Do we mark the [[Holocaust]] article, which 
is extremely upsetting, as "unsafe" for children to read? How about 
[[death]], which is upsetting for very small children? What about 
pictures of [[Bahá'u'lláh]], which observant Bahá'ís prefer not  to see 
in public, or even in their own homes?

I recommend reading RFC 3675 for a full and detailed discussion of all 
the issues involved: its authors conclude that broad-brush attempts at 
content filtering as "ill considered [...] from the legal, 
philosophical, and particularly, the technical points of view."

Rather than attempting to define "safe" and "unsafe" categories, we 
should instead concentrate on assigning all Wikipedia articles to 
meaningful fine-grained descriptive categories, without any implied 
judgment that a category is "safe" or "unsafe" for any given viewer. 
Downstream users who want to filter Wikipedia's content can then use 
this information to make their own choices.

-- Neil