Why do you believe that there is a need to make a "choice" between groups of people? We can easily supply all the data - it is up to the user to decide if they want to access it. Anyone active on the internet has the potential to unearth vast amounts of data. There are pro-choice and pro-life sites, there are sites about every religion, There are extremely left and extremely right winged pages. There are pages encouraging suicide, anorexia, bulimia and i can go on and on. Virtually everything related to humanity can be found in the 500 petabytes or so of data we have networked together. If you wish to find something, you can.
However, If i am not looking for a page about anorexia or bulimia, *I will not find it*; or at least not on Wikipedia. If i don't want to see a picture on a page, i can block it - See depictions of muhammed for an example. We - or at least i - are not here to appease to a certain group. We are collectively collecting data and transforming that into valid information - as much as we can. We don't withhold or censor information simply because some random group of people doesn't want to see or read it. We should practice biomimicry - we won't evolve into the best source for a certain task, but we evolve into the best source for all tasks combined. And that means that if i search for "Penis", i will find an article about it, and that article will likely be illustrated with a diagram or image. Why? Because a image describes the subject better then words can do. If that offends me, i should not be searching in the first place. Take the images on our gangrene <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangrene> page. They are in my eyes nauseating and not child friendly, but without them i would not be able to form an understanding of the subject. But the point is - don't search, don't find. Any child can safely search sesame street without ever finding pornographic content on Wikipedia. And frankly, if we are going to appease a certain group or censor ourselves we will head into the direction of Conservapedia, which only offers incomplete information that only little people can use. If anything we should be aware of possible issues. As i said before, there is no reason to offend just to offend, so controversial topics and images should be handled with care. There is no need to have explicit images all over the place, but they should be present in article's which talk about them. ~Excirial On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:40 PM, Anthony <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Excirial <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Sexual and medical images might be entirely inappropriate for children, > but > > they provide valuable information for other groups of people - for > example, > > a gynecologist or a medical student might have a completely non sexual > > reason to look at certain content. Protecting one group might well mean > > that > > we deny valuable data to another. > > > > So which group is more important? Which is the better answer, to tell > families to go elsewhere, or to tell the specialists to go elsewhere? > > I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, > and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
