[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Michael Snow]

Distributing this more widely, since apparently the forwarding from 
announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to 
release the following statement:

The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human 
knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects 
contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six 
million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new 
material continually being added.

The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the 
projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to 
some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural 
sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the 
sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is 
illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the 
grounds that it may offend.

Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational 
in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has 
no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend 
to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that 
already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially 
offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or 
informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no 
such value.

--Michael Snow