[Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

[Derk-Jan Hartman]

This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach
---

Dear reader at FOSI,

As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions.
Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous problems, because for the first time, a largely uncensored system has to work in the boundaries of a world that is largely censored. For libraries and schools this means that they want to provide Wikipedia and its related projects to their readers, but are presented with the problem of what some people might consider, information that is not "child-safe". They have several options in that case, either blocking completely or using context aware filtering software that may make mistakes, that can cost some of these institutions their funding.

Similar problems are starting to present themselves in countries around the world, differing views about sexuality between northern and southern europe for instance. Add to that the censoring of images of Muhammad, Tiananman square, the Nazi Swastika, and a host of other problems. Recently there has been concern that all this all-out-censoring of content by parties around the world is damaging the education mission of the Wikipedia related projects because so many people are not able to access large portions of our content due to a small (think 0.01% ) part of our other content.

This has led some people to infer that perhaps it is time to rate the content of Wikipedia ourselves, in order to facilitate external censoring of material, hopefully making the rest of our content more accessible. According to statements around the web ICRA ratings are probably the most widely supported rating by filtering systems. Thus we were thinking of adding autogenerated ICRA RDF tags to each individual page describing the rating of the page and the images contained within them. I have a few questions however, both general and technical.

1: If I am correctly informed, Wikipedia would be the first website of this size to label their content with ratings, is this correct?
2: How many content filters understand the RDF tags
3: How many of those understand multiple labels and path specific labeling. This means: if we rate the path of images included on the page different from the page itself, do filters block the entire content, or just the images ? (Consider the Virgin Killer album cover on the Virgin Killer article, if you are aware of that controversial image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer)
4: Do filters understand per page labeling ? Or do they cache the first RDF file they encounter on a website and use that for all other pages of the website ?
5: Is there any chance the vocabulary of ICRA can be expanded with new ratings for non-Western world sensitive issues ?
6: Is there a possibility of creating a separate "namespace" that we could potentially use for our own labels ?

I hope that you can help me answer these questions, so that we may continue our community debate with more informed viewpoints about the possibilities of content rating. If you have additional suggestions for systems or problems that this web-property should account for, I would more than welcome those suggestions as well.

Derk-Jan Hartman