Citizendium, the prudish encyclopedia
It seems that a major difference between Wikipedia and the new Citizendium is that Citizendium will perform censorship of certain materials deemed inappropriate (not “family friendly”). As such, they won’t cover some topics related to sexuality nor they’ll have “many” articles on porn stars and they certainly won’t include photos on the remaining sexuality topics.
The issue on whether the parents should allow their children to be exposed to sexuality from an early age is a hot issue, some parents, especially religious ones, fearing that their children won’t grow up to be prudes like themselves, while others realize that sexuality is a fact of life and hiding it from the children would not only be impossible (per the amount of porn on the web), but also not a good thing.
However, should an encyclopedia help the prudish parents? Isn’t an encyclopedia supposed to gather all the knowledge of the world? Sexuality has always an important thing for the humanity and we can’t just ignore it.
Many articles on sexuality on wikipedia are indeed badly sourced and they are not encyclopedic, but that’s also against the rules of wikipedia. A better policy enforcing on an encyclopedia using wikipedia’s rules would be just as good.
Then why the “Family friendliness”? Could it be just a cheap trick to gather some attention from the press and people who consider Wikipedia too liberal for their taste?
Someone, Think of the Children!
Hi,
I think you may be misconstruing Citizendium. We do not aim to scour all traces of sexuality from the encyclopedia; we do plan on building the best encyclopedia for all ages possible. In our current plan, that involves including articles on sexuality, but doing so in a non-graphic fashion. If a piece of information is important- as many aspects of sexuality are- there will be a place for it in Citizendium. But this does not necessarily mean we’ll have bios of porn stars.
Mike Johnson
Citizendium Executive Committee
The issue of porn stars is that if Wikipedia would follow its own policies, it would have to delete a lot of them. I’m not blaming Citizendium for this.
But the current page on differences from Wikipedia also mentions the fetishes: I think there’s quite a large body of literature regarding them and they can’t be considered “not important” or “non-encyclopedic”.
I think it’s early to predict how our policy will turn out– we’re still working out how it’ll work. Feel free to sign up and give your input.