[WikiEN-l] One reason why Wikipedia is not presently classroom-safe

Fri Feb 18 21:04:06 UTC 2005

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005 20:29:01 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> The article in question is a description of a bit of sexual jargon or
> folklore; the kind of stuff you get on Howard Stern.  As it seems to me
> that it falls within the remit of the deletion policy
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#Wikipedia_is_not_a_dictionary)
> I listed it.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Donkey_punch
> 
> Although the article has only been listed for only two days, so far there
> is a 2:1 majority vote for keep.
> In my opinion this kind of article would render Wikipedia difficult to
> describe as "safe for classroom use"; also teachers recommending it to
> younger children for homework research would be put at risk of censure
> because of articles like this.  Whatever those who voted think Wikipedia
> is, a classroom-safe reference work is clearly not number one on the list.
> This doesn't render Wikipedia content forever inaccessible to classrooms,
> however.  This and other articles of its type are in the category "Sex
> moves".  These could be filtered out easily during production of a
> classroom-safe copy of Wikipedia.

I do like the idea of images and articles being put into categories
such as "sexually explicit", "violent", "offensive language". A
(official?) mirror could be made which blocks those particular images
and articles, and it would be left to the school (or the school's
special school filtering service provided by their ISP) to block the
main site (and any mirrors and forks).

This is not censorship as we are not the ones restricting access. We
are just providing an alternative for schools etc. that *will* block
Wikipedia on the grounds of its content.