[Wikipedia-l] Censorship and bowdlerization

Thu Nov 14 07:37:52 UTC 2002

Mike Irwin wrote (for full text see beneath):

> If a minor has not established sufficient trust/respect
> with his or her guardian to be trusted online without censorship or
> spy software enabled ..... then perhaps it would be better (for
> the project and possibly for the child) if they were not participating
> at Wikipedia?

You could quite easily extend that argument, replacing "guardian" with
government and "child" with "people". Just a thought.

Steve Callaway

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael R. Irwin" <mri_icboise at surfbest.net>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 11:51 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Censorship and bowdlerization

> Zoe wrote:
>
> > If we don't do this, we're going to find that Wikipedia is being
filtered out by dumb parental control software and the protective filters in
place with such search engines as Google.  Then of what use will it be to
anyone?
> > Zoe
>
> It will be useful to anyone who does not install dumb parental
> control software or rely on censoring search engines.
>
> Please consider this:
>
> If a minor has not established sufficient trust/respect
> with his or her guardian to be trusted online without censorship or
> spy software enabled ..... then perhaps it would be better (for
> the project and possibly for the child) if they were not participating
> at Wikipedia?
>
> This might discreetly eliminate a lot of problem children
> which we could do without .... unless part of our purpose is to
> help civilize or educate problem children?
>
> That pesky target audience or customer profile thingy again.
>
> Regards,
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