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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."
I would've thought after the embezzling-expenses scandal, the Canadian-right-wing-talk-show-host scandal, the conflict of interest between his for-profit business at Wikia and the non-profit charity Wikipedia, and who knows how many others, that he would've been put out to pasture by now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If Wikipedia has porn, it competes with Wales' other web site, he wouldn't want that...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
What does that even mean? So you host porn. And you admit some of it is unnecessary. And the ratio of unnecessary porn to necessary porn is too high? WTF?! Just stop hosting porn, or STFU.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo
Censorship is a slippery slop.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
...but I know it when I see it.
Somebody wants information about human sexuality removed from an encyclopedia or he's going to walk? I say, let him and his puritanical beliefs walk.
I have been using wikipedia for since it's inception and never once do I recall being subjected to "pornography". However, if I needed to do a research paper for school on the subject, I would appreciate the maintained links that wikipedia provides. Censorship. Give me a break. Then you need a whole team of censors to debate over what is acceptable or not, which is unnecessary and ridiculous. IT'S AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. All information is acceptable. Because, it's informative.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
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)
Well, I read a lot of those comments and while they were for the most part overly negative toward you, I think they had some good advice.
A number of them let you know that if you want to champion this message that Wikipedia hosts child porn then you should probably drop the "and also I run a clean competing product called Citizendia." I'm not accusing you of this but on the surface it may seem that you are blowing this whole thing out of proportion in some sort of free-cyclopedia-war. I think the Slashdot comments sent you a very valuable message to keep both of these messages separate to avoid that possibility.
Another thing that comments focused on was your Libertarianism conflicting with your moralism. The comments explored possibilities in which "child porn" becomes used inadvertently without an actual production or desire for it to be used as such. What about when someone draws or makes computer simulations of said things? If it neither picks your pocket nor breaks your leg, shouldn't a Libertarian allow that? It seems your morals and ethics do come into conflict with a pure Libertarian stance. Slashdot has a large Libertarian readership so you should be prepared for this.
I was in a museum in New York City and saw an exhibit of with pictures of mentally challenged children playing outside in the grass, mostly undressed. Everyone else there was treating it as "art." I'd like to Google and find the artist for you but I'm not interested in that being saved in my Google searches. Which reveals to you that I'm not a big fan of what you speak of either (if it's any consolation) but I think the images on Wikimedia are community regulated and you're going to find an argument somewhere no matter what stance you take. For instance, I will defend [WARNING! Nudity] this image as an image of war, a reminder of Vietnam, a historical photograph and I am prepared to argue with you that that image has some merit and should remain on Wikipedia. But if I understand your stance that image needs to be removed?
You shouldn't take these comments as "ripped to shreds." Slashdot likes to avoid the obvious discussion and no one's interested in "I agree." comments as they don't add much to the conversation. When your ideas are on Slashdot, you're being flayed open for anyone to take any amount of time to poke at your soft underbelly and do what they want with it. Expect the full spectrum of responses and it seems that no matter how much I disagree with a stance, if you can form it into cogent and at least semi-logical defenses then you should be modded up.
You're a valuable member of the Slashdot community. I don't think you should take the highly rated, negative comments to heart and I hope you continue to contribute to Slashdot like NewYorkCountryLawyer.
My work here is dung.
the "universal" enciclopedy, where "all the knowledge" is contributed by "anyone" is about to filter certain content based in the moral views of a purist american? Well... doubleplusgood, I assume...
As long as it focuses on applying actual existing Wikipedia policy - removing stuff that's just plain porn, but leaving material that's sexually explicit but informative or educational - this sounds like a good thing. There's plenty of other places on the web for gratuitous beaver shots. But if it turns into an attempt to censor Wikipedia into a PG13 (or even R) "family-friendly" encyclopedia, or serves as the justification for a witch-hunt against "adult" subjects in general in the guise of a "protect the children" campaign, that'll be bad for Wikipedia and a really bad precedent.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Thank god there are still plenty of naked sheep on Wikipedia.
I suppose that Wales never took an art history course. Many of the world's most famous works of art could have been described as "images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests" in their time.
It seems that Wales doesn't want a Wikipedia that accurately describes our contemporary world. Instead, he wants a Wikipedia that prescribes what he thinks the world SHOULD be like.
What would blow his fucking mind is if someone went through and replaced ALL the live action porn with the anime equivalents, since they wouldn't trigger USC 2257, and isn't "photographs and film".
Bonus points if you track down various thousand-year-old woodblock prints like the one with the woman fucking an octopus and use those instead, public domain ;)
This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.
Hahaha... oh wow... For some reason, having a template letter for when people upload too much genitalia seems like a whole new level of bureaucracy. Please don't mistake this for a troll or flamebait, but as an outsider to the whole editing wikipedia thing, it's hilarious in a very immature way.
You see, for this template to exist, it must mean that on a regular basis there's gigabytes of penis.jpg being uploaded. It also means, that there's several editors constantly removing aforementioned penis.jpg, and when the uploader wishes to discuss the removal of their upload, someone is bound to discuss why it needs to be removed.
Thanks for this. For some immature and juvenile reason, this just made my day.
Much S&M is consensual, consequently not abuse.
Commons has around 6.5 million media files.
Someone who did a run-through of one of the main categories for such images (and its subcategories) gave an estimate of around 67k sex-related images, or at least images categorized as such. Let's assume, for the sake of it, that we're only getting maybe two-thirds of our sex-related images through categorization, and guess that we have 100k such images. With that assumption, convert 0.1M/6.5M to percentage, and you get ~1.5%.
So with a relatively wild overestimate, we get a small quantity, but not a negligible one. We're looking at on the order of 1% of all images. Considering how much importance our society places on sex (whether to embrace it or to revile it), I'm surprised we don't see more.
I'm divided on the issue, though. It's easy to attack Wales as a censor, (and certainly he deserves some attack for the autocratic position he's taking) but there has been a lot of crap content uploaded to Wikimedia Commons that features nudity, and I agree that even if you support porn, there's plenty that ought to be deleted just because the quality is so low. For example, there's a template with boilerplate for telling people off for uploading penis pictures, because after receiving endless craptastic penis pictures (among, hopefully, some decent ones) there is no point in gathering more.
On the other hand, it's easy to attack porn. "Porn" is stigmatized because sexuality is so taboo in our culture. Calling a lot of the images here "porn" is misleading at best. Many of them may be sex-related, but aren't specifically "prurient" (e.g. anatomical images), and many more may be good examples under very particular educational domains, or particular subjects. The risk is that good images will be deleted, ones that do have redeeming value. But when attacking "porn", everything sounds all right, because suddenly one is taking a moral high road.
Sanger was trying to take a moral high road earlier, saying "OMG CHILD PORN" when there was nothing illegal about (certainly the FBI doesn't seem to care, so far). It's easy to attack something by labelling it as something widely reviled, because by labelling the problem as some such thing you change the focus of the argument. Anyone who says "well, is that actually porn/child porn/whatever?" can be labelled as supportive of porn/child porn/whatever, and the target is put on the defensive, because there is already a social acceptance of attacks on these things (whether that social acceptance is right or wrong—though certainly in the case of child porn it seems obviously right) and the attack merely consists of conflating the undesired idea with the target of the attack. It's fortunate that Sanger was so clumsy in his attempt, taking all-too-obvious pains to mention his (failing?) rival project and to publicize the letter, because through that we can recognize the obvious interest he has in making Wikipedia/Wikimedia out to be evil.
I'm inclined, for now, to let the campaign against "porn" on Commons go. Is it the best road? No, certainly not, because it's based on emotion, not particular objective criteria. But in the long run, an emphasis against poor-quality images portraying sex-related topics is probably a good thing: high-quality images should be preferred, and a strict limit lets the project take its own moral high ground against these sorts of "OMG PORN KILL IT WITH FIRE" discussions. Even if there's a huge purge today, there's always the potential to re-upload this stuff if it's worth the effort.
I don't want to take a particular stand either way on the definition of porn or whether it should be around, but what I urge is a rational consideration of the merits of either approach, without giving so much credence to purely emotive (or moralistic) arguments.
If there's any point I'd like to end with, it's that no solution will satisfy everyone. There will always be the purists who think that all porn is evil, and on the other side the purists who want to avoid all censorship, and every number of points of middle ground.
Disclosure: I'm a volunteer admin on Wikipedia (but *not* on Wikimedia Commons).
Since when is a naked vulva pornography, though?
Put another way: would it be OK to have one or two pictures of naked vulvas? If yes, then they're obviously not pornographic; and if they aren't, there's no reason why the other ones should be. One could say that Commons still doesn't NEED 100 pictures of naked vulvas, but that's a different issue entirely.
Of course, you could say no, it's not OK to have even one or two pictures of naked vulvas, but I think there's a consensus that a neutral picture illustrating human anatomy is a) not pornographic and b) encyclopedic (which might or might not be a criterion for Commons, but still).
Wales has got a point when he points to 18 USC 2257 record-keeping requirements; these are legal obligations that the WMF would have to meet in order to host certain pictures, and it's understandable that they don't want to (and, most likely, couldn't even if they did). But beyond that, if a picture has educational value of some sort (and I'd set the bar very low there!), it should be acceptable.
(There's some finer points still: for example, uploading 100 snapshots all showing the same scene and taken over the course of 5 minutes with hardly any variation would obviously be unnecessary. Similarly, as above, if you have a dozen pictures of the same thing, you might not need many more, unless the new ones bring something new to the table - higher artistic merit, for example. But there's a big difference between "none of this" and "not too much of this", and the latter would equally apply to all pictures, anyway.)