> > Note: By 'we' I am referring to the persons actively and voluntarily taking > part in this project, not the naysayers. As of now only Ashlin seems to have > done any effort at all - hence all the others who have raised some concern > or the other while loosely but visibly alleging that wikipedia contains > pornography and titillating material (and completely ignoring the fact that > our mainstream media is 10 times more objectionable in content than the > unfiltered wikipedia will ever be) and who predict the end of Indian > civilization if underprivileged children (who are blasted with "Sheila ki > Jawani" et al on a daily basis anyways if anybody actually cared to check > ground reality) are allowed to see it while all this time not giving any > real, actionable solutions to the problems they raise - I would rather give > them a complete and total miss until I see the page histories actually > showing up their contributions. But that's just my opinion. > > Hi Nikhil,
I register my strong objection for this. There are various concerns even if the content is children friendly: 1. The content should be free of typos, factual errors. If a school teacher browses through random content and finds that the content is full of errors, not much useful then he may not circulate the CD to students. Once people get a bad opinion of Wiki, it will take lot of effort to get rid of that. If the teachers do not take note of these and circulate it is still worse as students get wrong info. Since there is a tendency for uninformed readers to believe whatever they see in print, we have a responsibility here. I understand you are not distributing / preparing DVDs for sake of school children. Nevertheless, why can't we make sure to distribute high quality verified content to whoever it is? 2. Articles need to be vandalism free. Any random zim backup you distribute may have vandal edits in at least few instances. Imagine what will be the reaction of media, academia and Government departments if a state leader's page is distributed with vandal edits. 3. Content with copyright concerns. No explanation needed. 4. Sensitive content: This matters if you intend to distribute to school children. This need not be just porn but even an article on prohibited rebel groups can bring the wrath of local government and ban Wikipedia completely in schools. This is not an impossible case. For example: Articles relating to civil war in Srilanka can be scanned by the Local government. I am not saying that we should censor content to please the government but giving whole dump can be really risky. Whatever content we distribute we need to be aware of the side effects and be prepared for it. Suppose, some one unrelated to Tamil Wikipedia provides such a dump and gets Tamil Wikipedia banned who is responsible then? The people who raise objection do a lot of groundwork in some Wikis and that is the primary reason why they object as they don't want their efforts to go waste. I understand your good intention to distribute DVDs but ultimately it should not hurt the local Wikipedia community's efforts. Please do not continue to see this as a personal / porn issue and do try your best to work together with respective Wiki communities before you proceed with such efforts. Thanks, Ravi
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