G'day all, I wonder if we might find a good spot to have a discussion, as a chapter, about some of the issues relating to the explicit content hosted on Wikimedia Foundation projects (notably commons) and how it impacts education outreach in general. Maybe some principles are easier to distill on a chapter level? - it'd be nice to think so :-) The English Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger, recently wrote; ''It is wrong for Wikipedia, both the community and the foundation, to portray its avowedly "uncensored"--read, absurdly child-unfriendly--resource as appropriate for children. This will remain the case until some sort of reliable filtering mechanism is available. At present, none is.'' http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Content_noticeboard&diff=prev&oldid=367443733 I tend to agree, and in particular I feel that the use of WMF projects within schools is inappropriate, and long term opens us up to significant harm in reputation, with consequent knock on effects on utility (ie. when external organisations engage with the nature and scale of such images, I believe it's generally pretty shocking and upsetting - and they may conclude that WMF is, overall, irresponsible in this area). I think it's fair to say that engaging in 'outreach' work, in the manner the chapter supports, and facilitates, probably comes with responsibility - perhaps I can kick off some useful discussions with this question; Do you believe children should have access to wikipedia at school? If so, do you believe any sort of supervision or protection is appropriate or necessary? Maybe the official wiki would also be a good place to discuss this - although a note I dropped in recently, really as a reminder to myself, has been removed by Andrew as nothing to do with education projects - perhaps we'll find a better spot? ( http://www.wikimedia.org.au/w/index.php?title=Talk:Education_projects&diff=2471&oldid=2459) cheers, Peter, PM.
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