The use of outside #standards

The notion that we are going to filter images maybe articles from our users makes me feel uncomfortable. The amount of bad faith in the discussion makes me feel nauseous; I have stopped following the multiple threads on the subject. The arguments why a single set of arguments should not be used are in my opinion compelling. The arguments why we do not want to set the values that enable the loss of immediate visibility are equally compelling.

Consequently I would like to steal a page out of the language policy; have an external body with sufficient authority set for us us up with the necessary values THEY need to do their job. We in turn can piggy back and enable the values set and allow our readers to select one of the levels provided they feel comfortable with.

So here is the deal; The IEEE LOM is a standard used by many educational organisations to mark electronic information that can be used on demand by students. The information is tagged in many ways including an age level that corresponds with what a teacher consider to be appropriate for a student.

There are multiple benefits to this scheme. It makes our content discoverable in an automated way from within education. Our content is rated for its usability and this provides us with feedback on our content. I am sure that many of our articles will be rated as "too long did not read" or using a vocabulary that is too demanding and consequently get a high age rating as a consequence.

Given that a lot of money is spend on providing quality educational information by many educational entities, they will be more then happy to do the rating. When you combine this with the use of FlaggedRevisions to store the information it seems a good fit for many reasons.

And yes, we can ask for contributions for hosting the data and providing content on a just in time basis.
Thanks,
        GerardM