Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/28/06, charles matthews charles.r.matthews@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.
You want Wikipedia to be "safe for work", where "work" includes in classrooms. The logical conclusion is that being "classroom-safe" will earn us plaudits from teachers. "Wow, a free encyclopedia, which doesn't include all the naughty things which are illegal to teach in Texas/Kansas/North Korea!"
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.
That an openly editable, largely unmoderated, uncensored website will be "safe for minors"? OTRS gets enough complaints from *adults* about "pornographic vandalism". Why should we offend minors any less?
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.
Odd, I could have sworn that it was the German language Wikipedia which had produced three hardcopies of its content...
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?
A spoiler warning indicates the *fact* that an article contains "plot or solution details" on the subject of the article. Content warnings would be incredibly objective and POV - once you start putting up "offensive content" tags, it's a slippery slope to...
"Warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of electron flow"
in [[electricity]].
Answer: They would be invisible to most users.
Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?