In recent years I have been a consultant to rural school districts in South Carolina, North Dakota, and California (and a subsurban district in Oklahoma). I give 2-week workshops to their history teachers, usually grades 6-11 and show teachers how to search the WWW.
All of the districts I have been to have centralized computer controls that affect the classrooms computers and library computers. They subscribe to nanny services that provide a list of naughty sites and block them. I agree a little profanity is unlikely to get on a naughty-list, but the issue here is not profanity it's obscenity, and the nanny-programs promise to block obscenity.
So we are talking about tens of millions of student users in the USA.
I think there is a terminological miscommunication here. I am emphatically not advocating what one might call the 'Wikipedia model'-- i.e., a large number of articles with explicit sexuality and language. I think that this is what you are referring to as "obscenity."
I am suggesting that there are a class of articles, small in number and primarily about literature, where profane language may be apposite in our treatment of a subject.
(It is worth noting that we do already have two articles in the main namespace with the word 'fuck.' If profanity is going to get us banned by NetNanny, we probably are already.)
It has also occurred to me that there might be a similar rationale (on the basis of fair treatment of the subject matter) for Art History articles with potentially offensive material. With Art History, I have to plead ignorance-- I just don't know enough about what might or mightn't merit inclusion in Citizendium.
I am not trying to deny that there will come a point when whoever is writing our articles on human sexuality will have to make some difficult decisions about what material merits inclusion, and what should be left out. Those will doubtless be difficult decisions, but again, I believe we should defer to the experts as best we can.
Here is a further refinement of what one might glibly call my pro-profanity proposal, which is justified by the necessity for caution in these matters. I suggest that if someone is writing an article on 'Roman invective poetry,' or 'Martial,' or 'Aristophanes,' or any topic, and feels that there is a compelling reason for including profanity in a quotation in their article (as far as I can see, the only place profanity in an article is justified), they should not barge ahead and put it on the main page. They should copy the relevant section of the article's text, insert the quotation, and put it on the talk page. When the article is being worked up for approval, the editor(s) will make a final determination whether the profanity is absolutely necessary for the article to be fair and complete, and insert it (or not) in the article.
I would further suggest that including profanity in the main namespace of the wiki without editorial say-so should be a serious offense, and, as with any other offense, may lead to banning if repeated. The risk for abuse is too great if we allow unchecked profanity.
I also realize that this discussion may seem like so much shadow-boxing. As far as I know, we don't have authors writing on topics with potentially offensive language at the moment, but we're also adding articles and authors at a pretty ridiculous rate. We should rationalize our obscenity policy, and to my mind, the sooner the better.
-Brian
edit: fixed typo
