Some of the comments on Fox's site are really over the top. Over the months on WR moderator, staff and the best contributors have worked to make clear that Moeller advocacy does not make him himself a pedophile. We have also worked to keep the subject free from conflating pedophilia with homosexuality and avoid the resulting homophobia and gay bashing. Still the case was made that a person engaging in such advocacy is not appropriate for service in a position of administrative responsibility in an organization that facilitates collaboration between adults and children. It was also argued that his views represented a deeply ingrained extreme libertarianism that was a major barrier preventing WMF from instituting any effective measures to assure child protection.
Having repeatedly made these arguments and having been ignored the issue has now made its way into the mainstream media in the form of Fox News coverage. It arrives to be greeted by Fox's constituency with many of their worst aspects, including homophobia, fully intact. While this makes me uncomfortable I still am grateful to Fox for the coverage. This coverage might have been missed altogether by more liberal media who are enchanted with technology and possess a shoot from the hip free speech orientation without taking a harder look.
For all of Fox News outrage they still have not completely grasped the most outrageous aspect of this scandal. They proceed as if this where a dispute about content only. They completely underestimate or lack any understanding of the nature of Wikipedia. This is not only a matter of protecting children not from the fleeting harm of viewing the offending material. It is also a matter of protecting children from the very real danger presented by the unsupervised collaboration of child and adults in the absence of any rigorous child protection measures. A twelve year old child receives more protection from a web site that promotes his/her breakfast cereal than from a Wikipedia that asks his/her participation in a sustained collaborative project engaging both adults and children. I don't suppose the comments will become much more rational once this threat is understood.
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