Is it really our task to worry about the impact certain content might have in a certain culture? There will always be people who are offended by a certain image, phrase or comment, and we cannot possibly accommodate everyone. I would argue that we *should not *consider ourselves educators who's goal is to teach students. Instead, we should think of ourselves as enablers - we create a large repository of (as far as possible) unbiased information that anyone can access and learn from if desired. If someone objects to certain content he or she can choose to discuss it, or otherwise they can refuse to "Learn" from it. Yet if they refuse, it is not our task to appease them by changing our content.
Neither should we strive to be family friendly or politically correct. 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. We should also keep in mind that the Internet hosts vast quantities of porn, which is often easier found then looking it up on Wikipedia. Therefor i would argue that a well written article illustrated with (possibly) explicit content can have educational value as well, if only to offset "Porn industry" style education. Having said all that i would also point out that i wholeheartedly agree we are not a porn repository or a web host for images. We don't need a million pornographic images just "to have them"; There are only so many places where those images have added value anyway. And equally we should stay well within bounds of the law, and take care that we don't go overboard adding explicit content; Any objectionable content should be handled with care, and has to be added in limited amounts as there is no need to offend people just for the sake of being offensive. But that doesn't mean we should swing the entirely opposite way. Removing old paintings because they contain nudity is, in my eyes, not helping anyone. ~Excirial On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Fred Bauder <fredb...@fairpoint.net> wrote: > It comes down to the size of the tent. If you want students in Saudi > Arabia to be able to use Wikipedia it has to be structured one way. If > you want to please gay college students you structure it another way. > > Really there is no right or wrong; it's a matter of who the resource is > going to be available to. We have no power to resolve the cultural > differences. We can only be aware and make decisions accordingly. > > Fred Bauder > > > Hmmmm... > > > >> The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the > >> projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to > >> some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural > >> sensitivities. > > > > Time to delete > > > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead > > > > I guess... > > > > _______________________________________________ > > foundation-l mailing list > > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
