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Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

As I recall, Wikipedia insisted on HTTPS for all access well before it was fashionable precisely so that governments couldn't decide which knowledge was OK and which was forbidden (and hence the whole site used to get regularly blocked by China because of e.g. the Tiananmen Square article).

It doesn't take much effort to find things the British establishment won't want kids seeing even though kids talk about them in school playgrounds (or at least we did when I was last in a school a bit over 23 years ago).

For example, I was given a summary of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by some girl in the same class as me when I was 8 or 9.

And even as an adult, you really don't want to see a real photograph of a newborn with anencephaly, which Wikipedia did have when I was first looking up the condition.

The point of Wikipedia — that it can be edited at any time — absolutely makes it impossible to survive any age rating system other than "adults only".

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> The point of Wikipedia — that it can be edited at any time — absolutely makes it impossible to survive any age rating system other than "adults only".

Oh but when it's news at dinner time showing dead children and weapons firing on and on it's all fine, I guess?

1) When that comes up in UK news, it does get prefixed with "this report has some scenes that viewers may find disturbing".

2) I don't know what the rules are for broadcasts at different times of day, but I do know they exist

3) I have always been perplexed as to why violence is considered so much more acceptable than, for example, sexuality. Outright murder? Apparently a suitable topic for children's shows. Nipples, which are the defining characteristic of the class Mammalia to which we belong? Hide them all! Unless it's a famous statue (then it's Classical Art), or a man's vestigial ones (then it's so unremarkable nobody even says anything).

Re 3) FYI this is a relatively US/UK centric approach. In most of the countries I lived in, besides the UK, the bias was against violence, in this context.

Edit: there was an IG account posting solely picture of nipples, male and female, cropped so it was hard to ascertain the sex of the photographed person.

It existed purely to mess with the IG censorship rules. I don’t recall the name of the account but I think it was a genius idea.

It's not of course. But 'screening' news casts for 'inappropriate' content is easy and it is easy to point fingers when it doesn't meet 'standards'.

Whereas with wikipedia, unless a dedicated team of editors who are contracted or liable to vet _every_ change. Possibly only for the UK, who get a special 'only with vetted edits' version or some such, I don't think wikipedia would be interested in making such a thing.

Separate from that, wikipedia has various pages on (conditions related to) our sexual organs, as well as lots of articles about politically contentious things. I don't think they are particularly interested in filtering that either.

In contrast to news channels, most of which would have no particular complaints about a bunch of rules about content. As a rule your 9'o clock news isn't going to just casually show frontal nudity (except e.g. Germany because they're fine with it).

One obvious problem is all those words in single quotes: Who gets to decide? Evidently you aren't happy with whomever decided how far you can go with the content shown on the news, and I concur that it goes quite far. But the point isn't about the current standards being applied. The point is whether _any_ standard can be applied at all.

To news: Yes. To wikipedia: Not in a way wiki foundation would accept.

> Whereas with wikipedia, unless a dedicated team of editors who are contracted or liable to vet _every_ change.

A few other Wikipedias including the Turkish one work in that exact manner.

I've not heard of this before, do you have a reference for that? I can't find it easily, but… well… Google's not so great at this kind of thing any more.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flagged_revisions

Shouldn’t we also make encyclopedias usage prohibited for children? Perhaps technically easier to just forbid both encyclopedias and children within libraries.

Sometimes people un-ironically say such things about dictionaries.

I would note that there are such things as "children's encyclopaedias"; I might have had an earlier edition of this one myself as a kid: https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Illustrated-Encyclopedia-DK...

(I wonder if they still put in the cartoon of the Aztec Blood Sacrifice?)

Careful with that irony Eugene,

there have been displays on the news even recently of people who find the Arts unacceptable because they may depict genitals (Greek Urns, Renaissance Statues etc.),

so easily you will find around voices that could respond recommending that children be protected from exposure to the Arts.

(And - ironically - not from the obscenity of those very voices.)

There was a Simpsons episode about that, wasn't there?

I mean this is a very good argument, so what I'm about to say is not much of a counterargument and more of a feeling.

But fuck that shit. Sure some information is unpleasant (and frankly an image-free wikipedia would be very convenient for some queries), but trying to prevent this with age restrictions is just not the way to go. Trying to prevent this from reaching the school playground is like restricting kids to keep them from scraping their knee, it's futile and likely more harmful than beneficial.

I kinda agree with your vibes, though only kinda.

Our world is a big complex mess and people have uglier souls than I'd like; the transition from innocent childhood to the adult realisation of this should be… kind and sympathetic, not just the equivalent of throwing someone in the deep end of a pool to teach them to swim.

>like restricting kids to keep them from scraping their knee

Extremely on-brand for the UK.

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