[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net> wrote:
> It comes down to the size of the tent. If you want students in Saudi
> Arabia to be able to use Wikipedia it has to be structured one way. If
> you want to please gay college students you structure it another way.
[snip]

The deletions performed would not have done even a bit of good making
Wikipedia more useful to students in Saudi Arabia.  For that we must
first start with
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy.

In the access to wikipedia to the general public was inhibited due to
a commercially available album cover. I expect that Chinia is still
very unhappy with our coverage of human rights and other political and
historical subjects.

Even in US schools, I can't believe that ones who would inhibit
schools over risqué drawings from the 1800s sourced from the US
library of congress would suddenly permit access while we still
detailed anatomical photographs.

(As far as I can tell Jimmy's "almost complete cleanup" included only
one of the almost 300 human penis pictures — is anyone actually
proposing we remove all the anatomical images?)

It's important to state a goal— it might be arguable to continue
deleting educational images if it would cause Wikipedia to be usable
in more places... but without a stated goal all we could hope to do is
cause the harm without enjoying the benefit.