Privatemusings and others, I hope you will take some time to consider the thoughts that I've laid out on Yahoo! Answers, and monitor the responses to these.
The Wikipedia article about Hafada piercing (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafada_pier… ) is only one click away from the article about Earring, which is viewed about 37,000 times a month. Itself, the Hafada piercing article is viewed upwards of 12,000 times a month.
Should I be introducing my 6-year-old daughter to this article about Hafada piercing? What about her 9-year-old neighbor friend? When is it "too soon" to share all of the glorious things Wikipedia has to offer youngsters, or is it never too soon?
Additional DetailsYou may also wish to look at the Wisconsin court case of State v. C & S Management to help inform your answer.
Yahoo! Answers participant "Bill M" recently said here that "Wikipedia has never purported to be appropriate for children, to my knowledge."
Jimmy Wales has in fact said:
"When we go down to younger students, and I don't have any particular idea of the cut-off dates, but certainly someone a lot younger than 16; a 10-year-old is writing a little short paper for class, and they want to say they got some information from Wikipedia, I think we should just be glad that the kid's writing and actually thinking about giving credit -- due credit -- to people who have helped. And I think that's wonderful."
Source:
http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2… (at about the 19:30 mark)
So, my question is... if the 10-year-old is doing a report on "gel bracelets", such as those promoted by the Lance Armstong Foundation and the group Make Poverty History, thanks to an infobox at the bottom of the "gel bracelets" article, the 10-year-old may readily click to articles about "Donkey punch", "Gerbilling", "Rainbow party", and the really lovely "Soggy biscuit".
It's possible that this post here will result in that info template being removed from the gel bracelets article. But the point is, that template has been sitting there since July 30, 2008, thanks to User:Benjiboi (take a look at some of his edits, sometime). The article's been viewed about 12,000 to 14,000 times a month (
http://stats.grok.se/en/200808/gel_brace… ). How many of those views were 10-year-olds writing a "little short paper for class", who now know all about donkey punches and rainbow parties.
I say that this is NOT wholly the responsibility of "the parents" to stay on top of. If Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of the tax-advantaged project, is saying that his encyclopedia is "wonderful" for a 10-year-old, then when my 10-year-old is exposed to donkey punches and worse at an age that's inappropriate, if not illegal, for me to be exposing them to this, then I say it is high time that Jimmy Wales and his inept Foundation start taking responsibility and living up to their promotional hype.