[WikiEN-l] Re: Reliable, selectable content

Thu Apr 7 09:56:32 UTC 2005

On Thursday, April 07, 2005 6:27 AM, Tim Starling
<t.starling at 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 at jdforrester.org | jon at eh.org | csvla at dcs.warwick.ac.uk
IM  : (MSN) jamesdforrester at hotmail.com