[katabasis]

I'd love to see something like this that is marketed to parents or schools who want to give kids a way to access the good parts of the internet (Wikipedia, e-books, etc) without the toxic parts. Maybe throw in some kind of de-centralized social media or file sharing for collaboration with other students or like-minded families. Kiwix + Pi-hole + Activity Pub basically. The device could create its own network (that only allowed access to an allowed list of sites, defaulting to a list of educational projects).

If no one produces such a device I may need to make one myself by the time my toddler gets old enough to go online.

[Rediscover]

Didn't England or GB do (does?) a curated dump precisely for that purpose? I'll pull up the info tonight if no one else chimes in.

[Rediscover]

The closest I found, which partially matches my memory, was from SOS Children that claims "This selection of articles from Wikipedia matches the UK National Curriculum ..." and "... we’ve checked all the articles, tidied them up a bit, ..."

https://web.archive.org/web/20171022101730/http://schools-wi...

[xandrius]

I'd definitely support this (even help). My non-related wish for my future kids would be to have some modern version of the BASIC games you would have to type in manually.

I never did that but it sounds a really fun to get into technology and programming. The difference is that I'd use different languages and maybe also allow them to draw images (with paint) and such. Everything offline and simple.

[daniel_iversen]

You could maybe install something like NextDNS? (even the free version might cut it) - I think that can block major categories including. the ones you mention.

[fritzo]

It's exciting seeing grassroots censorship efforts like this.

[katabasis]

The modern internet is filled with content designed to track, mislead, and manipulate users (especially young users who don't have a full set of critical thinking skills). I think it is totally appropriate to want to give families (not the state, FWIW) the tools to take back some control.

Giving kids accessed to a curated experience online sounds much more feasible than keeping them offline all together, but most parents don't really have the technical know-how to do this themselves (and tech giants like Google, FB, etc. are not interested in providing these capabilities).

[mock-possum]

That’s the first thing I thought as well - as long as Wikipedia remains open and public and free there’s a degree of transparency and accountability there -

But if you download your own separate offline version, it can be whataver you want it to be, and that will be all your users get - whether your goal is to ensure access to the ‘right’ parts, or to disappear the ‘wrong’ parts. You could even start out with the former objective, but end up with the latter situation, depending on how things go.

That isn’t quite the same situation with the definitive version of Wikipedia live on the World Wide Web.

[jjulius]

I don't think it's productive to assume we know exactly why someone would use this, and how they would both implement this and discuss it with their children in their own home, and then attack them based on said assumption.

[settsu]

That is entirely not how a healthy society works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

[fritzo]

Do you think katabasis' proposal is unhealthy for a society? It strikes me as healthy for parents to keep their kids at ideological home during an information pandemic, to provide access to educational material and shelter from social media.

[jeffhuys]

I think your original comment was mostly parsed as sarcastic.

[settsu]

Yes, that's how it read to me.

I.e., interpretation...

katabasis: (Suggests sensible guardrails for children)

fritzo: THOUGHT-POLICE!!

[kitd]

s/censorship/content curation/

[photochemsyn]

Wikipedia qualifies as toxic Internet for many people for several reasons: it's heavily manipulated by political and corporate interests as part of their image polishing media strategy, the links that are used to provide credibility for articles are poorly curated and often broken, and the internal power (deciding which articles get heavily edited by invested interests etc.) structure of Wikipedia is mostly hidden from the public.

If anything, children should be taught that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, meaning citing a Wikipedia article in a bibliography for a paper should never be allowed by any responsible educational institution.

[lurk2]

> the links that are used to provide credibility for articles are poorly curated and often broken

I didn’t appreciate this until a few years ago when I got into the habit of going on deep dives to find primary sources. Easily half of all the sources I checked were either paywalled, out of print, or simply didn’t say what the Wikipedia article claimed they said.