[WikiEN-l] Britannica quote of the day (Johntex)

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/28/06, charles matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> I would call it a complete change from five years of getting the
> encyclopedia written.  It bears repetition: the mission is to get the
> encyclopedia written, the free NPOV encyclopedia.  Not to try to gather
> plaudits from classroom teachers.  It's an old discussion here: GFDL means
> _someone else_ can perfectly well make the fork that is more child-safe.

Wait, where did anyone mention plaudits? You want to get the
encyclopaedia written. I want the encyclopaedia to be useful to
people. These goals are not incompatible.

> With any luck, they revise their views on the Internet as a whole.  The
> place is not 'safe for minors'.  I don't know where they might have got the
> idea that it is.

You could hope for that.

> It's good to know that the fine old tradition of monolingual Anglo-Saxons is
> in such good shape.

It's in excellent shape. And it's pretty much monolingual anglosaxons
who have driven Wikipedia thus far.

Of course, if you were trying to insult me, you missed your target :)

> But the whole concept of a 'safe' Wikipedia is just crocked.  What we have
> is 'knowledge wants to be free', and a few semi-permeable membrances put up
> on the wiki will not suffice to counter the osmotic pressure.

How about a "safer" Wikipedia? We have spoiler tags on articles about
movies and TV shows, and that didn't seem to cause anyone a
philosophical crisis. How would content tags be vastly different?

Answer: They would be invisible to most users.

Steve