Anyway, your point is ultimately irrelevant, so let’s get back to the real issue. It isn’t your job to tell parents how to raise their children. You can wish they raised them a different way. Fine. But if you’re going to be truly tolerant and liberal in your attitude, you should be tolerant and liberal of the wide diversity of parenting styles. In order to support that, you’d have to support having some opt-in filters, as Google has.

In any case, my personal opinion about porn (as I said, I’m a libertarian) is irrelevant. My point is that parents should be given the tools they need to take their own approach.

Porn – First world problem.

I’m not sure I ever argued for the much more difficult-to-defend proposition that children should be sheltered from porn, although I happen to believe that. I maintain the much more modest proposition that websites should support parents and schools in their efforts to protect children from porn. It’s much worse considering the truly egregious stuff that Wikipedia hosts and defends. We’re not talking about the sort of stuff that you can find in anatomy books.

The point is not to make it impossible for children to view porn. If they really want to, they’ll be able to. No part of my argument implies anything different. The point is to reinforce the idea that it is verboten for children, to reinforce the societal norm that it is not appropriate for children actually to be viewing the stuff.

If I were designing the filter, I would want it not just to be a warning screen but something that makes it impossible to view the stuff as long as the user is logged in with that account. Besides, if Wikipedia had the “to-filter” data in its database, then it would be easy for people to build more powerful tools.

The “parents should be responsible, not the internet” talking point is one made and propagated by teenagers and people who are not responsible for children. How should parents be responsible without tools that make it possible for them to exercise their responsibility? It’s pretty hard (not impossible, I’m sure) to find a filter that does fine-grained filtering of the sort that Wikipedia should be doing. Yes, parents would like to be responsible. Lacking an effective filter, how? Stop kids from using Wikipedia? That’s my solution for now. My child is forbidden to use Wikipedia. We have a subscription to Britannica, which is perfect for my 6-year-old’s purposes.

Besides, this silly point is effectively demolished by the reply that Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc.–all the big boys–are cooperating with parents and teachers in this way. Why not Wikipedia?

Unlike you, I don’t paternalistically presume to tell parents how to treat the topic of sexuality. If they want to raise their children with no boundaries–poor children–that’s their prerogative as parents. If they do, then they should be supported in reasonable efforts in approximately similar ways to Google, etc.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I see three general assertions:
1) Children should be sheltered from porn.
2) WMF should do something to protect children if they are going to promote themselves to children.
3) WMF should not censor content, just create a screen.

As for the first, I’m afraid children are smarter than most adults give them credit for. Even before the advent internet, I figured out from a line in Tom Sawyer that human anatomy books had some kind of titillating content. Just from that I learned all kinds of things my parents wish I hadn’t when I was in the second grade. Maybe that was too young, but if it’s a question of censoring Mark Twain, I’m willing to say early exposure is the lesser of the evils. Unless there is a major, MAJOR shift in the functioning of the internet, keeping kids barred from adult content is just not going to be possible anymore.

If your issue isn’t with access to the information/images in general, rather that it’s available through a source people don’t think to question, then (my apologies for being blunt) I think your idea of a click-through warning is worse than ineffective. It would probably be counter-productive. The warnings on television that “the following may be disturbing for some viewers” draws kids and teens like moths. There is no better way to guarantee a child will try to read something than banning it. The warning screen would be nothing more than a gesture, and without outright censorship, it would do nothing more than call attention to the adult material.

I’m going to go with the “parents should be responsible, not the internet” side of the argument, but not by telling people to hover over their kids’ desks. When I learned about the birds and the bees from books, magazines, movies, and eventually websites, I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. I was painfully shy with no close friends, and my parents just told me not to read smut and left it at that. That didn’t make me stop wanting to learn, it just left me at the mercy of my own naïveté, discomfort, and curiosity.

So, I say to parents that we need to teach our kids to be educated, responsible, comfortable, and respectful when figuring out their sexuality. What kids don’t need is to feel guilty, ashamed, lost, or – above all – rebellious. Teach kids that their bodies are absolutely their own to do with as they choose, and those choices, good or bad, will affect them forever.

They say that the only thing evil needs to work in this world is for good people to do nothing. I say the only thing needed for children to develop warped or harmful attitudes about sex is to have all the well-meaning and responsible adults in their lives turn a blind eye and sweep the whole subject under a rug.

Or behind an opt-in warning screen.

One thing I don’t really like and find quite ironic is the fact that you are able to share this on Reddit of all places. Isn’t that site even worse than Wikipedia when it comes to this? With all the controversies etc…
I understand that you might want this to reach as many people as possible, but still.

Thank you for taking your time to write about this and hopefully also reading and responding to this comment.