[WikiEN-l] Don't push POV into the Wikipedia software and policies

Thu Feb 24 17:13:44 UTC 2005

Tony Sidaway wrote:

>Fred Bauder said:
>
>>This is true, O'Reilly can do just as good a job on Wikipedia as he did
>>on Ward Churchill. He's not going to discuss our article on Canada, or
>>Abraham Lincoln, he's going to go straight for the jugular, our
>>carefully considered articles on "sex moves" and autofellatio.
>>
>
>Why should I care about this person's opinion?
>
>
O'Reilly is an important part of the crowd that got 59 million to
vote for the robber barons against their own best interests, and
there are lots of ways that a sustained campaign by Fox could make
trouble for WP, far beyond anything Stormfront could mount.

Even though we ourselves might not want a bowdlerized WP,
it would be extraordinarily convenient to have some kind
of subset quasi-mirror that advertised themselves as
"child-safe". We already have a hundred lamers trying to
make an advertising buck off WP content, just need one of
them to think of selling a filtered version into schools.

It would also emphasize WP's role as developer of new content,
attracting people who prefer to be at the edge. Sort of like
the difference between getting Linux from source repositories,
vs a packaged and tested distro.

Stan