[WikiEN-l] Re: Filtering, etc.

Sat Jun 7 20:14:16 UTC 2003

At 12:44 PM 6/7/2003, you wrote:
>To bring it back to LittleDan's original issue: if the existence of
>'felching' in the encyclopedia gets it banned from all schools, then
>isn't that problematic?
>
>Or: if I can't in good conscience send something with a more delicate
>temperament than mine to wikipedia, then isn't that problematic, too?
>
>--Jimbo

Not to be hard-nosed about it or anything....

Yes, if [[felching]] gets us banned from schools, that is a problem... for 
the schools. I don't really see it as a problem for us. The schools lose 
out on a source of information that, in my opinion, is unparalleled in its 
usefulness.

As I see it, it is up to the schools (or, more properly, the parents of the 
students in the schools, or the administrators/politicians responsible for 
school policy) to fix this problem. The problem, as I see it, is not the 
inclusion of felching in the Wikipedia, but that some people are /so/ 
narrow-minded that they will block access to the whole 'pedia because it's 
here.

I'm sorry, but if other people want to censor information from themselves 
and children in their charge, that's /their/ problem, not ours. I don't see 
why we need to be held hostage to the Puritanical views of a few people out 
there who think that it would somehow be a disaster if a child read the 
felching article. Why do their work for them? If they want a filter, let 
/them/ write it. Let /them/ argue what it should filter. Let's leave 
Wikipedia just the way it is.

-----
Dante Alighieri
dalighieri at digitalgrapefruit.com

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their 
neutrality in times of great moral crisis."
    -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321