[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Mike Godwin]

Tomek writes:

So... are we now going to start writting "USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm)" ?
> There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and
> vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars,
> articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of
> things to be deleted in order to make our projects more "family
> friendy".
>

For what it's worth, I personally don't see the issue as one of making
Commons (or Wikipedia or any other project) "family-friendly." There will
always be content that some substantial fraction of the reading population
will find offensive. This would be true even if the projects were limited to
text.

There's also no urgent legal issue driving any changes to Commons -- we
don't have reason to believe any category of content we knowingly carry on
Commons is definitionally illegal under U.S. law. (Obviously, when if people
upload content that is illegal, and we're informed about its presence, we'll
remove it -- most likely, volunteers will remove it even before it gets the
attention of the Foundation staff.)

If we judge Commons content simply on the basis of "Does this content serves
the mission of the projects?" there is no doubt that some content will
removed, some offensive content will not be removed, and Commons will no
longer be a kind of "dumping ground" for anything and everything regardless
of whether content lacks encyclopedic usefulness. As a side-effect of this,
you probably get both (a) a resource that is somewhat more "family friendly"
(because the sheer frequency of merely offensive images is reduced) and (b)
a resource that remains essentially "uncensored," consistent with its
encyclopedic mission.  (I use "uncensored" here to mean "not edited merely
to avoid offense.")


--Mike