Schools/colleges banned Wikipedia use in 2007-2008

That essay about the "Wikipedia bans" mixes various almost unrelated phenomena. Mostly, colleges and schools rightly said - with the support of the WMF's communications manager - that students should not be blindly citing "Wikipedia" as a source of information. Which should be uncontroversial - students should be clicking through or visiting the library to read the actual sources cited, for obvious reasons. But a few of the articles concern the w:Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (and a subsequent resubmission), a mercifully failed effort to ban children from accessing any kind of user-submitted content on social networking sites, possibly including Wikipedia (with the FCC being able to rule at whim about what is included or not). Such a ban, among other things, expresses either an incredible naivete or an unspeakable deceptiveness about how children are abused, when we consider that, by contrast to the perhaps seven children that might be saved by such a law as detailed in the article, there are estimates of hundreds of thousands of children being forced into prostitution in the U.S.^[1] This was truly one of those cases where the tribal witch doctors were asking for statues to appease the gods when what they needed was penicillin to stop the infections. The good news is that DOPA didn't pass... the bad news is that the U.S. still hasn't freed these children, as might be achieved e.g. by a carefully regulated legalization of adult prostitution. Wnt 23:16, 21 April 2011 (UTC)