Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedians for encyclopedic merit/offensive material rating system

It appears very difficult to draw the line between academic study of pornography without appearing to advocate propaganda for the industry. The articles should remain as neutral as possible, especially on a medium where the average individual or company can add propaganda at will to the articles, especially via related links sections.

Since the growth of Wikipedia popularity recently, we see more and more complaints by various users who find that the content of many articles promote agendas rather than provide academic information only, or that the articles are of an offensive nature, which must be avoided.

If wikipedia has to be considered a serious encyclopedia, its academic position should remain clear and obvious. This is not an easy task.

The idea about adding pornographic pictures, for instance, might or might not be a good idea at current time; but it would definitely be acceptable if there was a proper rating system with defaults set at the highest censor level.

Since this is a worldwide project, which is accessible from anywhere on the planet, by people of varying backgrounds and countries, it is imperative that a proper system be worked on. Saying that rating all type of content which is known to be controversial or morally offending to some is an incentive to restrict liberty is false, considering that any type of material could be documented properly and consequently rated. It becomes up to the user to decide which content is appropriate for viewing. Restricting the possible censor categories to an already in use system for the video industry in a particular country would seem inappropriate, unless the audience was expected to only consist of people of that same region, and that only that particular type of content was available. One cannot advertize and preach a certain view of the world expressed in a particular country to the world, and this is even true among several generations of the same people of the same background. Thus, a censor system would need to properly be implemented and to allow to block many type of offending content.

The following is only a suggestion (Request For Comments), of things to consider. An international commity could enhance and or rework the system, and define the appropriate censor levels for each category. This also implies that every article would need to be rated in every chosen area for which restrictions are possible. Although partially off-topic on this article, it is recommended for people who find such a proposal reasonable to possibly move this into its own article and link it as appropriate, contact mediawiki developers as required, etc.

Obviously, for each category the default would be to censor at the highest level. To avoid the need for users to register in order to modify their preferences, a permanent HTTP cookie could also be used and stored on the client-side to remember the user settings without clobbering the server's storage area.

This means that articles, as well as every linked object such as media content should independently be rated in each category.

The required software technology to achieve such a system is trivial to write, there is nothing challenging about it. Remains to see if Wikipedia aims to reach, and keep, a worldwide audience, and to eventually adapt itself to this growing public environment to cope against being banned by certain groups.

Another aspect would be weither to keep all settings at the topmost censor level depending on certain types of User-Agent, i.e. it might be desirable to allow search engines to index content which would normally be censored by other HTTP clients for which no settings were saved yet.

This section's text is posted as-is, and released in the public domain.