CZ:Proposals/Should we reform our family-friendly policy?

This proposal has not yet been assigned to any decisionmaking group or decisionmaker(s).
The Proposals Manager will do so soon if and when the proposal or issue is "well formed" (including having a driver).
For now, the proposal record can be found in the new proposals queue.

Driver: Brian P. Long

Complete explanation

I think it's pretty clear that this is, in Citizendium parlance, an issue: there are people on both sides of this debate.

Option 1: Continuing Self-Censorship

The first option would be to maintain the status quo, either by leaving our Statement of Fundamental Policies and our policy pages untouched, or by rewriting the policies but keeping an implicit or explicit ban on profanity and violent or sexually explicit material. Making this determination for human sexuality articles would be particularly tricky, and we would likely need to spell out in advance that we will have an article on topic X but not topic Y.

Option 2: Overhauling the Policy

A good, general-purpose encyclopedia does not appeal primarily to the prurient interest, and it is worth keeping something on the books to this effect. (However, if Citizendium is set up to allow effective filtering, trying to police content should become a non-issue.)

Overhauling our content policy would mean moving away from self-censorship, and moving closer towards the Intellectual Freedom policy recommended by the American Library Association. That is, we should provide parents, teachers and librarians with the tools to select content for their children, students and patrons, but we should not seek to act in their stead.

A new policy might read: "Citizendium does not tolerate material with needlessly explicit language or images." The key word in this definition is "needlessly." An earnest article on gangsta rap will have very compelling reasons of fairness and accuracy for including profanity.

Reasoning

At the moment, we have not spelled out just what content is or is not permissible in our articles (i.e. nudity, profanity, graphic violence, human sexuality). At the same time, though, all users on Citizendium are required to sign on to it when they agree to our Statement of Fundamental Policies. Furthermore, "family-friendly" is a phrase with distinct ideological overtones, and has become something of a term of art.

Furthermore, our current policy has not been particularly successful. As of this writing, there are at least two pages with language that is explicit by any definition, and there have been a number of other cases where, after lengthy debate, content or discussion was deemed to be un-family-friendly by some contributors and not by others. There are situations where extended debate is productive and informative, but personal standards of decency are just that-- personal. Extended debate on these issues is a waste of time.

A school district or a public library is inextricably connected to a particular community. The school or library is funded by the community, and has a duty to be responsive to the needs and concerns of community members. Citizendium, on the other hand, is on the internet. We have no immediate community that will tell us when our content has violated the community's standards. We have, by contrast, contributors and readers from many different countries and communities around the world, where, as discussion on the forums has shown, standards differ widely. Parents, educators and librarians will need to make judgments about what content they find appropriate for their communities, but Citizendium as a whole should move away from self-censorship.

There is a tension between the desire to avoid offending some readers and the desire to write a bold, interesting encyclopedia. There is a class of literature which relies on bawdiness and vulgarity for effect; serious writers and translators no longer rely on Latinate language or asterisks, and neither should we. Analogous cases may be found in Art History and Music, and there is very little content we can provide on human sexuality without offending someone's sense of 'family-friendliness.'

Citizendium's goal, generally speaking, is to provide a free, reliable encyclopedia, but this goal is vitiated if our content is filtered and thereby inaccessible to secondary school students. A central component of this proposal is therefore to find a method of marking our potentially objectionable content so that it can be blocked by internet filtering software (8e6 & Bess at the school district level; NetNanny, Squidproxy & Norton for the home user).

Implementation

1. If approved, rewriting policy pages
2. Evaluating filtering software; figuring out how to integrate content ratings, so to speak, with MediaWiki software
3. Implementing technical changes, if necessary
4. Writing 'A Guide to Citizendium for Parents and Educators' (and maybe a separate guide for librarians)
5. And after all of this, finally changing the policy!

Discussion

A discussion section, to which anyone may contribute.

Without speaking about more substantive matters, I want to address one meta-issue: we can talk about "reforming" the policy (depending on what is meant by that). But the policy will not be rejected: the basic concept is part of our fundamental policies, and the Editorial Council has no standing (if it ever will) to edit those policies. --Larry Sanger 21:23, 25 April 2008 (CDT)

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