Steve Bennett wrote:
On 3/29/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email)
<alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Wait,
where did anyone mention plaudits? You want to get the
encyclopaedia written. I want the encyclopaedia to be useful to
people. These goals are not incompatible.
You want Wikipedia to be "safe for work", where "work" includes in
classrooms. The logical conclusion is that being "classroom-safe" will
earn us plaudits from teachers. "Wow, a free encyclopedia, which doesn't
include all the naughty things which are illegal to teach in
Texas/Kansas/North Korea!"
Yeah, sorry, I'm just not seeing where you're getting "plaudits"
(praise, accolades) out of all this. There are other motivations for
doing useful things than wanting a pat on the back.
Earlier you wrote "Yes, I am leaping to the conclusion that making
Wikipedia an attractive resource for teachers for use with kids is an
improvement."
You could hope for that.
That an openly editable, largely unmoderated, uncensored website will be
"safe for minors"? OTRS gets enough complaints from *adults* about
"pornographic vandalism". Why should we offend minors any less?
I suspect adults complain because the content is there. Teachers etc
know that the web is filthy, they just (afaik) want a reference site
where their kids aren't going to be looking at porn.
Ok, so someone else could fork us and produce a meta-stable "clean"
version. Wait, doesn't
answers.com do that already?
A spoiler warning indicates the *fact* that an
article contains "plot or
solution details" on the subject of the article. Content warnings would
be incredibly objective and POV - once you start putting up "offensive
content" tags, it's a slippery slope to...
So, plot details are facts, but naked breasts are subjective. I
disagree completely. If anything, I think what is a spoiler is very
subjective - no distinction is made between details of unaired
episodes, minor plot points and character deaths, soapies and suspense
thrillers, for example. Whereas, as we've seen, the examples where
content ratings are contentious are fairly contrived, and mostly come
down to whether nude art is pornographic or not.
Whoops, we should probably swap all instances of "subjective" and
"objective" in those two paragraphs.
However, "offensive" is most definately a subjective term - the term
"bugger" can be offensive in certain contexts, as can the infamous
phrase "so where the bloody hell are you"...
"Warning: This article contains graphic
descriptions of electron flow"
in [[electricity]].
Sure, that's a great example. No, really.
So, you're willing to tag *all* articles based on their content?
Are you then willing to tag the list of tags?
"Warning: this set of articles have been identified of being of a
biologically accurate/theologically dubious/unscientific nature"? (sex,
evolution, and creation respectively)
Answer:
They would be invisible to most users.
Really? So, if they're "invisible to most users", what's the point of
having them? Why not just leave them out altogether?
Presumably you would make the same argument for removing braille
markings from food products in supermarkets.
Braille on food products is expected by people with impaired vision. Who
is going to which readers do and don't see the warnings? Please stop
trying to build strawmen...
--
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