[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I learned about the imminence of this announcement and as I often do I
blogged about it. As you will read I am in favour of scrutinizing much of
the material that is largely irrelevant. At the same time there are
historical reasons why we should not go overboard and remove much of the
material that is of value or put labels on material that is obviously
problematic.
Thanks,
       GerardM

http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/05/nudity-sexual-content-on-wikipedia.html



On 7 May 2010 21:30, Michael Snow <wikipedia at verizon.net> wrote:

> 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
>
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