[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia can never be fully "safe" and also open...

Sun Feb 20 21:44:02 UTC 2005

Even if there were total agreement among Wikipedians proper content, so 
long as Wikipedia is open to "zero-threshold" editing, it will always 
contain a certain among of material that does not belong. The 
equilibrium between the rate at which such material is inserted and the 
rate at which it is removed guarantees this.

Even if we had a consensus so clear that "obscenity" could be a valid 
speedy candidate, removal would still not be _instantaneous._ As things 
stand, questionable articles will remain visible for at least five 
days--and the very existence of the VfD discussions makes it easy for 
anyone who wishes to attack Wikipedia to find them.

No matter what technical mechanism we put into place, tagging an 
article as offensive likely to be considered debatable and require 
several days to ascertain consensus before the tagging becomes stable.

This doesn't affect the broad questions we've been discussing, but it 
does mean that Wikipedia will _always_ be vulnerable to those who wish 
to attack it for containing offensive material. The only way to change 
this would be to subject every article to _prior_ review before release 
into the main namespace.

I think it's pointless to discuss making Wikipedia "safe for 
classrooms." Any teacher who lets his or students access Wikipedia will 
always be taking some risk with their career. The risk is small, and 
that a prudent teacher in the right circumstances might deem it 
acceptable, but it will always be there. The risk of a student running 
across one of these pages _by accident_ is very small, but in the 
fifties my little friends and I were certainly getting _our_ giggles 
looking up "rape" and "carnal" and "vagina" in the dictionary, and 
discoveries are quickly shared.

In George Orwell's novel, _A Clergyman's Daughter_, a schoolteacher 
inadvisedly presents "Macbeth" to her students. They reach the words 
"Macduff was from his mother's womb/Untimely ripp'd," and a student 
asks the fatal question, "Please, Miss, what does that mean." She 
explains "haltingly and incompletely--but she did explain," and the 
following evening she is confronted by angry parents who feel "it is a 
disgrace that schoolbooks can be printed with such words in them; I'm 
sure if any of us had known that Shakespeare had that kind of stuff, 
we'd have put our foot down at the start.... If I had my way, no 
child--at any rate, no girl--would know anything about the Facts of 
Life till she was twenty-one."

Fast forward to Holden Caulfield's tombstone, and Wikipedia.

--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith at verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/