Stan Shebs said:
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".
Absolutely. This is what I've been proposing for some time. The
Wikipedia project is probably now mature enough, or close to being so, for
content mirrors to be produced for specific purposes such as not upsetting
parents.
One close friend of mine won't let her very bright young kids anywhere
near Wikipedia. She's intelligent and liberal-minded but she's no fool.
Wikipedia is not suitable for young kids. But there is inside Wikipedia
such an encyclopedia.
It doesn't need to be bleeding edge, in fact for the purposes of study and
classroom use it's actually a problem if article content changes day by
day.
Imagine you have a dozen or so trusted monitors who trawl through
K12-potential material scanning for the latest "safe and reliable" version
of each article. They could use some kind of client interface to
special:export which enables them quickly to scan multiple versions and
follow Wikilinks. On finding one they click a button and this information
is fed into a database table on the server. Then for schools you have a
Wikipedia engine that operates in read-only mode and, instead of the
latest version of each article, only delivers the article if it's present
in the school table, and then only the latest version of the article that
is recorded in that table. If an article is in the school table the user
sees a message saying that the school version of Wikipedia doesn't contain
an article on that.
This would require quite trivial software fixes, plus at least one spare
school Wikipedia engine, but it could use the same database servers the
main Wikipedia uses.
You would also need published school content guidelines and a procedure
for school Wikipedia users to notify unsuitable content.