Being sooo screwed is what I am trying to avoid ;-)and it does seem to be one of those confounded issues, that no matter what you do, someone will find fault with it.

Also, it seems I may not have been clear on the source of the requirement. It's a requirement that I am placing on the project, not someone else, at least not explicitly and more on what I believe my users would expect. Ultimately, I want to be able to legitimately and in good conscience market the product/service as "family and kid friendly".

...you need a usable definition to cover your butt.

Indeed, and being new to potentially publishing something like this, that is exactly what I am trying to do, but am not sure of where exactly to start. I'm certainly no prude, and as a parent I know what I do and do not want my kids exposed to at any given age... but that's just me. I have friends on either end of the spectrum from my position.

So, my ultimate goal would be to satisfy those within 1-2 std deviations of some norm, or possibly just not worring too much about the outlying points on some distribution of values. Of course this begs the question what is the NORM. Well in short I don't know and don't think I can know for all (probably not even most) "communities".

So, all this really does lend a lot of credence to using the community policing/XP model. Oddly enough this had not occured to me prior to reading the responses, so many thanks. However, it would seem that I could be leaving my self open if there were not some "minimal" standard that is first imposed; then allowing the "community" to take it further as it deems necessary. Perhaps, filtering on explicit foul/obscene language and then letting the users flag other things for removal via community policing.

My main concern with the pure community policing model is latency. How long will something be there and available to kids before someone tags it and gets it removed?

I also like the suggestion of a trusted moderator. I think that would be a must for the community model. Otherwise someone on an extreme end could overly impose their view by "burning every book in the library" in a manner of speaking.

Thanks for all the help so far, I definitly have my work cut out for me.

BTW: "Everything Engine", I had not heard of it. I found the "Everything Development Engine" at everydevel.com, which looks like it could be quite useful down the road, thanks. Right now, I just have my hands full defining the requirements and definitions for the project.