[Wikimediaau-l] Wikipedia and schools

[Nick Jenkins]

> Lets look at this differently, Wikipedia/Foundation is about providing
> free access to all knowledge, how could someone who supports the
> project consider promoting censorship of the information?

Well, one argument would be "the lesser of two evils".

Suppose you have a choice between these two situations:
1) Schools opt not to include the Wikipedia in their syllabus (because
it contains content the teacher / the parents / the children may
offensive), so to avoid the whole minefield of issues, students are not
taught about the Wikipedia, and by extensions are not taught about free
access to all knowledge.
2) Schools teach the Wikipedia in their syllabus, and the concerns they
have about offensive content are handled as part of the wikipedia itself
with (e.g. there was a DVD project like this in Germany for schools a
year or so back that only included G-rated content, which is an
alternative white-list approach). These ratings/categories/whatever can
be shared between schools/states/countries, centralising the solution to
problem inside the Wikipedia (instead of pushing the problem out to the
nodes), and making the whole Wikipedia far more usable in our
under-resourced classrooms as an educational resource. Children are
taught about the Wikipedia, and by extension free access to knowledge.
And if they have enlightened and/or clueless parents, and if they find
something blocked at school, then they can view it at home, without any
restriction whatsoever.

Which of these situations does the most to promote free access to
knowledge? Sometimes you have a choice between two sucky alternatives,
and you choose the best option that you can (and not making a choice is
the same as de-facto making a choice - by not making a choice, you ARE
making a choice). In one situation you transparently police yourself. In
another you get idiots like the IWF opaquely policing you. In one
situation you give schools something they can work with to decide what
they don't want their students to see, in the other you get ignored
completely because "it's just too damn hard, and someone will complain,
and I don't have the budget to do this right, so let's just teach them
using whatever ancient pre-censored textbook we taught them with last
year".

-- All the best,
Nick.