Another reason parents might want to ban Wikipedia from schools and libraries

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, Wikipedia is little more than a disinformation source that presents a biased, mostly leftwing Beltway establishment view of U.S. politics. And, due to its innumerable inaccuracies it's already been banned from some schools and libraries or at least forbidden as a reference. On the other hand, exposing it to sunlight is the best desiccant.

However, parents of young children might think different due to the following issue.

Let's say an eight-year-old wants pictures of docks for a school report. They enter "dock" into Google, and the first choice is this WP page:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock

Now, scroll down to "Other", where there's a link to this page:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sex_positions#Genital-genital_sex

(Warning even for adults: the image at the last is both NSFW and very hairy).

For an even more common basic English word, try this:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg

One of the pages in the "See also" section is definitely NSFW.

By now you know where I'm going with this, but here's one more:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rim

And - trust me on this - these are only scratching the surface.

There's a sanitized version of WP available (schools-wikipedia.org), but I'd imagine that most people - including those in grade school - access WP via the web.

If anyone has other examples, please leave a comment.

UPDATE: I spelled "desiccant" wrong, now corrected. I don't want Wikipedia to be disinfected, I want them to dry up and blow away. Of course, that's not likely to happen but if enough people stop linking to them they'll become less of a pernicious influence than they are now.

Tue, 07/14/2009 - 05:55 · · Importance: 4