> Lets look at this differently, Wikipedia/Foundation is about providing > free access to all knowledge, how could someone who supports the > project consider promoting censorship of the information?
Well, one argument would be "the lesser of two evils". Suppose you have a choice between these two situations: 1) Schools opt not to include the Wikipedia in their syllabus (because it contains content the teacher / the parents / the children may offensive), so to avoid the whole minefield of issues, students are not taught about the Wikipedia, and by extensions are not taught about free access to all knowledge. 2) Schools teach the Wikipedia in their syllabus, and the concerns they have about offensive content are handled as part of the wikipedia itself with (e.g. there was a DVD project like this in Germany for schools a year or so back that only included G-rated content, which is an alternative white-list approach). These ratings/categories/whatever can be shared between schools/states/countries, centralising the solution to problem inside the Wikipedia (instead of pushing the problem out to the nodes), and making the whole Wikipedia far more usable in our under-resourced classrooms as an educational resource. Children are taught about the Wikipedia, and by extension free access to knowledge. And if they have enlightened and/or clueless parents, and if they find something blocked at school, then they can view it at home, without any restriction whatsoever. Which of these situations does the most to promote free access to knowledge? Sometimes you have a choice between two sucky alternatives, and you choose the best option that you can (and not making a choice is the same as de-facto making a choice - by not making a choice, you ARE making a choice). In one situation you transparently police yourself. In another you get idiots like the IWF opaquely policing you. In one situation you give schools something they can work with to decide what they don't want their students to see, in the other you get ignored completely because "it's just too damn hard, and someone will complain, and I don't have the budget to do this right, so let's just teach them using whatever ancient pre-censored textbook we taught them with last year". -- All the best, Nick. _______________________________________________ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l