[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

Sat May 8 05:58:10 UTC 2010

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 3:06 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> ... I see no reason why we should cooperate
> with censorship, however well intentioned.

I think cooperation with censorship is the only safe ground.

If we perform censorship ourselves, the quality of our projects
suffers and/or contributors leave in disgust.

If we are uncooperative with censorship, we are in effect using our
projects, which have a very large footprint on the internet, to
aggressively force the issue.  I think this is a distraction.

Whether or not our readers accept or desire censorship is their
decision, and it is common for parents to want to censor what their
children can access.  That is the reality of it.  I agree with Andreas
that is our loss if we force these people to "ban" Wikipedia when they
would prefer to censor only the most obscene.

Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem "important" to
the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit
POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar.  The filters can then scale with
us.

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-powder-primer-20090901/#ICRA1

--
John Vandenberg