On Thursday, April 07, 2005 6:27 AM, Tim Starling
<t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
[Re. ICRA content warning labels for Wikipedia]
I'm not sure if they're appropriate for
Wikipedia, but it's certainly
something to discuss.
Well, the insurmountable problem, AFAICS, is that people (and, certainly,
software) treat content warning labels as absolutely accurate
all-of-the-time ones. Though potentially we could correctly label almost all
of the content, it's that last 1% that would be blown up out of all
proportion and most likely get us actually blocked by the ICRA. How do you
stop someone on a wiki from adding "drat" to a page without also flagging
it? Automatically? Then what about "d<span></span>rat", or
"dr<span
style="color:inherit;">a</span>t", or .... And, certainly, it
would require
pre-vetting of all images before they could be added. This would be useful
to many, quite possibly, but would be entirely impossible to work into the
way a wiki, well, works.
ICRA labels (or, at least, an NPOV form of them) could quite possibly be a
good idea on the static site, when we launch it, because all articles would
by the very nature of the static form of Wikipedia be pre-vetted and
checked. But, until we're a lot further along that path, ISTM a little
incongruous to discuss this.
I have, of course, ignored the philosophical and moral parts of the
argument, but the 'real-world' problems with content labelling trump this, I
feel.
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester -- Wikimedia: [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
Mail: james(a)jdforrester.org | jon(a)eh.org | csvla(a)dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM : (MSN) jamesdforrester(a)hotmail.com