[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Fred Bauder]

> 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.
>

We can make choices and commit to those choices, if we chose. Probably
creation of a children's fork, a PRC fork, and a fundamentalist Muslim
fork would solve the main problems. I can't see it happening, but that
would be a solution. It's no different from a car company putting out
several different models.

Fred Bauder