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)

I am by no means arguing that we scrap the policy, or that we reject the basic concept. Whether we're in agreement about other matters, I think we are in agreement about bearing the concerns of parents, educators and librarians in mind. Brian P. Long 21:38, 25 April 2008 (CDT)

You mention pages that have had problems concerning the family policy. I do not know of these, and I do not see how we can have a discussion without substantive material to discuss. If there have been actual cases then why have you not specified the exact article titles, and what conceptually seems to be the problem with each one? Otherwise, this is all theoretical and you cannot improve on the existing policy without going into detail.Martin Baldwin-Edwards 17:05, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

I assume you are referring to my comment in the 'Reasoning' section above-- I was obliquely referring to two articles in the main namespace with profanity. I see that John Stephenson has asterisked one of them already (The Lord of the Rings), but the other one is Luigi Meneghello.

I think the important point is that both of these articles have had profanity in them for a long time-- the LOTR article since it was written in December, and the Meneghello article since July 2007. Beyond that, though, even though these articles contain (or contained) profanity, it's still not clear that these articles were not "family friendly." At present, we have a slogan, not a policy. If vulgar language will get us filtered completely in schools and homes (as some have maintained) we need to have a clear policy that is actually enforced. Brian P. Long 17:40, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

Implementation Issues

On my day off, I've been poking around the 8e6 website (at http://www.xstop.com), to find out, in more detail, just how we might help users of filtering products work with Citizendium. The quick and dirty solution would have been just to put tags on our pages that match the categories filtering products use. To some extent, it seems like this might be possible, but it does not look like it will be straightforward.

Looking at the list of categories of material from the xstop website (at http://www.8e6.com/database-categories.html), it's clear that the categories they use end up being very broad. If we stick with their categories, it seems like the best solution would be to tag all of our questionable material as 'R-Rated'. It's worth noting that this does not seem to have any relation to the content in R-rated movies-- on balance, it probably comes out being something closer to PG-13. On balance, though, PG-13 is probably about the worst Citizendium articles are going to get (this means: some profanity, some nudity, moderate violence).

On the other hand, though, if we do start getting content that strains the limits of the R-Rated tag, we could always tag these articles with xstop's 'Pornography/Adult Content' tag-- this would be the nuclear option, so to speak. My feeling is that xstop's R-Rated category is actually pretty broad, and would be a passable fit for most of the offensive content CZ might have.

Another option would be to implement something akin to Google's safesearch. xstop's products, and presumably those of other companies as well, can force safesearch on for users behind the filter. We could do something similar, but a lot more implementation/coding would be involved. On the other hand, this could be far more powerful and useful. We could also use R-Rated tagging as a stopgap measure, and then implement something better when we have the time. If no tech people volunteer, I will assume that the programming option is off the table. Thanks, Brian P. Long 13:06, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

I just checked it out, and Net Nanny seems to be set up in much the same way as xstop's products. It too has categories for both R-Rated material ('Adult/Mature') and pornography. Net Nanny also has dynamic filtering for language, so that parents can decide in advance what vocabulary their children will and will not be exposed to on the internet. Thanks, Brian P. Long 16:20, 3 May 2008 (CDT)

Hello--

I have also been corresponding with folks at NetNanny and 8e6 about how we might best proceed if we wanted to change our family-friendly policy. They have confirmed that profanity will pose a problem for filtering products. As I understand it, "dynamic analysis" has become the industry standard, and will block pages with profanity if that is how the filter is configured.

Another thing that has become apparent is that there already are a number of ways to categorize content so that it can be caught by internet filtering software. If we implement one of these, the filtering products should have no difficulty filtering out objectionable content.

At this point that I sit down in the road and ask for help. There are at least three content tagging systems: PICS, ICRA and Safesurf. In the next little while I would like to flesh out the implementation section of the proposal, but I would not mind having some help in evaluating which of these tagging systems would fit best with our set-up.

Safesurf is at http://www.safesurf.com/classify/ . PICS is at http://www.w3.org/PICS/ , and ICRA is at http://www.fosi.org/icra/ . Let me know if you have any comments about these specific content tagging systems. Thanks, Brian P. Long 17:45, 8 May 2008 (CDT)

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