Wales Supports Purging Porn From Wikipedia

Larry Sanger writes "Jimmy Wales recently took a bold position against pornography on Wikimedia Commons: 'Wikimedia Commons admins who wish to remove from the project all images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests have my full support.' Wales also restarted the "Commons:Sexual content" policy page. His basic complaint is that Wikimedia Commons hosts too much unnecessary porn, and he wants to get rid of it. He underscored his seriousness this way, stating that we can expect 'a strong statement' from the WMF soon: 'If the Wikimedia Foundation wants to declare that it is OK for Commons to be a porn host, they can do that, and I'll not be able to continue. That isn't going to happen, though, and in fact you should expect a strong statement from the Board and/or Sue in the next few days.'" (More, below.) Sanger continues: "This comes about a month after I originally posted my report about depictions of child sexual molestation on Wikimedia Foundation servers to the FBI, which Slashdot duly ripped to shreds (as only Slashdot can), and a little over a week after the FoxNews.com story. The latter coverage reported that one of my senators, and my representative to Congress, had forwarded the matter to the FBI's Assistant Director of Congressional Affairs. I'm happy to be able to congratulate Jimmy Wales for his good judgment on this, and I look forward to the larger Wikimedia community approaching these issues with a little more sanity."

Comments

Slippery Slope

[captor.tn]

'Wikimedia Commons admins who wish to remove from the project all images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests have my full support.'

"THEY CAME FIRST for the images,
and I didn't speak up because images of non-prurient information are of debatable public interest in an encyclopedia.

THEN THEY CAME for the risque subject matter,
and I didn't speak up because risque subject matter of non-prurient information is of debatable public interest in an encyclopedia.

THEN THEY CAME for the less debatable subject matter,
and I didn't speak up because less debatable subject matter of non-prurient information is of debatable public interest in an encyclopedia.

THEN THEY CAME for ---"

Re:"too much unnecessary porn"

[amplt1337]

Not only that -- the phrase "too much unnecessary porn" implies that there is an appropriate, non-zero amount of unnecessary pornography that should be hosted on Wikimedia servers.