"Steve Bennett" wrote
On 3/28/06, charles matthews
<charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
WP is quoted by top-quality media sources.
That's being taken seriously.
That's called living dangerously :)
Well, you are leaping to the conclusion that a
subtraction (to appease
some
group offended) is an improvement.
Yes, I am leaping to the conclusion that making Wikipedia an
attractive resource for teachers for use with kids is an improvement.
What would you call it?
I would call it a complete change from five years of getting the
encyclopedia written. It bears repetition: the mission is to get the
encyclopedia written, the free NPOV encyclopedia. Not to try to gather
plaudits from classroom teachers. It's an old discussion here: GFDL means
_someone else_ can perfectly well make the fork that is more child-safe.
More
assumptions. I think parents are more likely to be 'shocked' than
kids; especially those naive about what one can google for.
Yep. And what do parents do when they're shocked by something their
kid saw on Wikipedia? Anything pleasant, useful, or beneficial to the
Wikipedia project?
With any luck, they revise their views on the Internet as a whole. The
place is not 'safe for minors'. I don't know where they might have got the
idea that it is.
That's a lower risk, to me. I think it's
significantly less likely
that a person would stumble onto a pornographic site by clicking
interwiki links. Hell, the chances of your "average" English speaker
clicking on an interwiki link at all are fairly remote, let alone one
that took them from a "safe" page to an "unsafe" one.
It's good to know that the fine old tradition of monolingual Anglo-Saxons is
in such good shape.
But the whole concept of a 'safe' Wikipedia is just crocked. What we have
is 'knowledge wants to be free', and a few semi-permeable membrances put up
on the wiki will not suffice to counter the osmotic pressure.
Charles