Most appropriate disclaimer/warning

I am adding up items to a crime/criminology course (Spanish-English), and the course contains, of course, some forensics stuff. Some items deal with the “ugly” stuff of death, dying, corpses etc. Do you think this disclaimer in the course description is appropriate enough? “Disclaimer: some items WILL disturb you!”

It’s more of a warning than a disclaimer…

Surely anyone (any reasonable person) who would undertake a course with crime/criminology in the title or the summary would take for granted that some of the course content would deal with ugly stuff. I for one, would be disappointed if it didn’t. :wink:

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@Sircemloud, merci, indeed, I’ve replaced “disclaimer” with “warning”.

@sifushano: I think more or less the same, but the … ahem … sorry… really sorry… criminalisation à la americaine of … everything (?) entails all sorts of more or less stupid prohibitions lately … don’t want to get complaints for “brutal language” from suave souls getting nightmares because of my course :sunglasses: -

maybe one day we’ll have to mark our courses in here with R-(rated) …

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I am one of those folk who believe in removing the warning labels to let nature take it’s course. I get your drift, but would wait for complaints and then foist the reasonable person line at them (throwing petrol on a fire I guess) for added humour levels. Will latin language courses have to present such warnings as the language is comprised of gender specific words? That is also sure to offend some. Where does one start and stop?

I don’t find myself easily offended, so I would struggle to rate a course or provide a disclaimer in such a way, hence sitting back waiting for the complaints.

I wonder if there have been any in the forums historically (hysterically)?

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well, about sexy/anatomy language/mems and stuff… cannot provide you with the links, as the old forum is gone :grin:

disclaimer: the author of this post constantly flagged (or removed from the courses she is curating) any mems containing violence/abuse/hate speech etc

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Well, a reasonable person wouldn’t be expected to tolerate violence/abuse/hate speech etc. :innocent:

You’re ranting.

This is good, but technically you don’t know what will disturb me. And it makes me curious, like an age warning would, so it perhaps will have an opposite to its intended effect, attracting learners instead of letting it die in obscurity. Does the course describe in detail someone getting murdered or raped and its aftermaths for example? Then it’s inappropriate for the majority of people, and I don’t know why you would want to make a public course for it. Are there a lot of South American criminologists on Memrise who need to go to the U.S.?

Yes @Arete_Hime, I was. :sleeping:

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Here you go. Enjoy! :smile:

http://www.memrise.com/thread/1294917/
http://www.memrise.com/thread/1311052/
http://www.memrise.com/thread/1288017/

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[quote=“Arete_Hime, post:8, topic:386”]
oes the course describe in detail someone getting murdered or raped and its aftermaths for example? Then it’s inappropriate for the majority of people, and I don’t know why you would want to make a public course for it. Are there a lot of South American criminologists on Memrise who need to go to the U.S.?
[/quote] HUH? Why what US? why South American what? (I am European through and through, btw). What are you talking about? No, it does not describe a rape, but has some forensic terms - they don’t tend to be about flowers and flicks… With all due respect, your self-righteous reaction describes exactly what I was talking about in the original post.

thanks @alanh

There are some very good approaches to this topic buried in there. As per usual, forum posterity provides some funny moments. It is a reminder that a heated response looks a bit stranger as the years draw on from when it was made :smirk:

You’re bordering on trolling on that subject. Keep it to the heart of the matter

:smiling_imp:

Is this intended to be a reply to a previous post? Which?

Nothing specific @sifushano. Just the overall impression about the length of the post and the lightness of the recent exchanges.

Being French, I am all for debates and intellectual divergence and convergence of views but, you (plural) need to keep focused on the subject of “disclaimers” and “Warnings”. I would think :innocent:

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Hey @Hydroptere, :wave: you need to scatter some smiley faces around in your posts :grinning:

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@sifushano: huh? disclaimer: I was busy resting :sweat_smile:, the weekend just started…

The founders of Memrise were proud - from the very beginning - to announce that medical students, chemists, etc can cram for exams/tests using Memrise. I’m memrising/cramming because I am using foreign languages at work - and also for being able to practice my learned professions in other corners of the Earth. So… I will leave the warning in the description of my course, for potential users who are not practicing in those fields (or related fields.)

Off topic but serious question: in this new and shiny forum, is some joking allowed, thou? … a deadly serious forum … :scream: (btw, memrise never made public who are these “strict” (“strict” according to which criteria?) “masters” of the forum… some of them leave the impression they’d like to scare some people away. I don’t mean you, @sircemloud)

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I understand your comment @Hydroptere.

Being trusted here early might have gone to my head. It was made clear to us to try to help setting this Forum on the right path, and trolling was a point made.

http://community.memrise.com/t/start-here/84

This being said, it must be a pleasant place to interact. But it must also be somewhere easy to navigate and find the answers, or knowledge.

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I will communicate as I see fit. I’m just another user. I might possibly, perhaps, in some limited cases, reply slightly more patiently as in the other forum, but don’t count on it.

Not if that joking is at the expense of other people as far as I am concerned. But it’s not my call, I’m just another user.

Some of the posts by @sifushano look to try to make fun or mock of other people, so I don’t like them:

Mocking or making fun of people who might be offended:

Making fun or mocking me (but I was being unpleasant, so some unpleasantness in return is okay):

Making fun of the people responding in those previous discussions:

Mocking @sircemloud, who I think was trying to be diplomatic in not naming anyone:

Trolling level: 2/5. Not too serious, but definitely unpleasant, especially if sustained.

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@Arete_Hime, that is one way of reading the posts above … which also helps to underscore the difficulties people have holding such discussions on topics such as this. The written word can carry the author’s intent and emotion, but all to often this is overridden by the reader’s intent and current state of mind.

This topic started out with the precept of a forensics course that may have some gory, you know, forensic stuff in it, and some may find it unpleasant. My response entailed a reasoning that any reasonable person would surely expect to find such material in a course thus. I even lightly remarked that I would be disappointed if it didn’t - given that one would reasonably expect that of forensics study material.

Granted, this is a harshly worded statement that might be out of place but at least lets others know where I stand on the subject of over-protecting to the point of censoring. Something we all face every day.

Actually, I was agreeing with you not mocking you. I was ranting, and when I wrote it I was tired - hence the emoticon.

Again, I was highlighting how different the conversation looks when the heat of the conversation has passed. I most certainly wasn’t mocking, more highlighting the reminder that it posed to me personally. Also, as I had read through all of the three links posted, I was stating that a lot of the early thinking on this topic had been captured there (which you left out of your selected quote above):

and inferring that it wasn’t necessary to reinvent the wheel on this topic.

I wasn’t mocking @sircemloud. I could understand his stance and I was trying to reintroduce some levity as I also thought that the tone had become a little heavy. There were only a handful of participants and any reasonable person reading them would most likely have come to the same conclusion that I leapt to (gleefully I might add, and @Hydroptere certainly didn’t seem to have her nose out of joint about it).

Now, I would have left all this alone had I not been accused of this heinous crime (and I am not referring to poor trolling). One might hope that if you took the time to read back over it as a moderator (a moderator has to exact a certain amount of judgement, and judgement should be exercised with balance) and saw the other side of it - it really was reasonably light-hearted - particularly un-troll-like behaviour.

(Now, where was that nice bridge I saw earlier …) :wink:

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