[Wikipedia-l] Censorship and bowdlerization

Wed Nov 13 14:47:36 UTC 2002

I like the idea expressed by Anthere and others of finding a way to shield tender eyes from "adult" stuff. A significant minority of users believe that young people of a certain age should not be exposed to certain materials.

This is totally without prejudice to the debate over whether sexuality is "sinful", just a reflection of the desire of many parents and educators to introduce some subjects step by step, keyed to the maturity level of the learner. 

Someday, we plan to make the Wikipedia available on CD-ROM for schools and libraries that don't have T-1 lines (or the patience to tolerate the "lag" problem). It would be very useful to allow a parent or educator to filter out a few articles such as [[****-piercing]] or [[fisting]] or whatever.

A rating system would facilitate this.

I myself would like to be able to filter out the following (in no particular order):
* Any mention of TMC's username (as in Recent Changes, his user page and user talk page)
* All articles on bizarre sexuality (BDSM, etc.)

I would like to retain the articles related to homosexuality, since they are so well written (i.e., NPOV rather than pro-gay) -- but I might be biased by pride of workmanship since I put a lot of effort into some of them.

Those who don't want this filtering should be able to bypass it easily.

So it could be a user option, with the default set to NO FILTERING.

Ed Poor
Tolerant Absolutist