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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'm tempted to upload photos of S&M to the relevant articles now, since he seems to think they're always okay to speedy-delete, even when they're not sexual. From the link:
"Content which would trigger for the uploader or anyone else the record keeping requirements of USC 2257 can be speedy deleted. This refers to photographs and film - all other artistic media is excluded from this requirement, unless derivative of one of those - of actual or simulated acts of... 4. Sadistic or masochistic abuse."
I might not be a leather fan, but that doesn't make it okay to remove this kind of stuff.
(And before you say that this only applies to WMF, not WP, keep in mind that they are the same entity! It won't be long before this policy trickles over into the various language WPs.)
~ C.
Does anyone have an idea what "porn" this guy is talking about? I checked out the wikipedia article on lolicon he mentions and found only a cartoon image of clothed young girls. This is just an attempt to draw attention to his lame encyclopedia [deleting link; its a website by a some douche bag].
[...]you should expect a strong statement from the Board and/or Sue
So, who is this Sue?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I'm surprised to hear that there is a lot of pornography on the Wikipedia Commons. I look at the "Wikipedia Commons:Quality images candidates" page daily. It's where I get my various desktop background images. I've never seen any pr0n. OK, once there was a picture of a woman real close up. I mean real close up. But that's it. Am I looking in the wrong place?
That's not pornography (though I object to this image, of course, for many reasons).
The fact that 3 idiot mods upvoted you does not even surprise me anymore.
There are folks who view any and all nudity as pornography. Do you see the conflict now?
Should I have marked the link with NSFW? It all depends on who you ask.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
This book depicts incest and child sexual acts and it should be the first to go. It also promotes hate crimes against homo sexuals, slavery and violence towards women.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Of course this is a big fat social red herring with the biggest problem being the nailing down of exactly what porn is.
I'm honestly too lazy to look up the textbook definition right now... But the fine summary has it pretty close to right.
images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests
The problem is, somebody has to evaluate what constitutes educational value and then quantify it somehow and then measure it against some kind of quantified prurient interest.
For someone who's looking for information on how to safely practice bondage or erotic asphyxiation, the pictures might be of high educational value. Might even save a life.
For someone who's just clicking through random articles on Wikipedia and stumbles across naked people it may look like straight-up smut with with no redeeming qualities.
Traditionally, it's been up to the community to decide what constitutes porn, generally on a fairly local level. If something winds up going to court it's usually up to your peers to decide whether there's educational content or not.
But with something like Wikipedia there's really no such thing as local. Or, rather, everything is local.
I'm sure there are folks somewhere in the world who consider the simple line drawings depicting how to give yourself a breast self-exam absolute filth. But most of us here in the US probably think that's of fairly high educational value.
So what do you do? Do you take down the self-exam diagram because you've offended someone on the planet?
Do you leave up something almost universally-prurient because somebody out there might find it educational?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
True, and that rises interesting questions about whether the 1st Amendment or other laws like it are still sufficient in modern day. When corporations near governments in their power, shouldn't they be subjected to the same standards of behaviour?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Most of the time I spent on Wiki has to do with exotic animals or theoretical physics, or other topics that are almost by definition "educational". /.'er who had forgotten what "vulva" was.
I do however remember picking up this brilliant reference from a
While it can be educational in context, this might be a bit borderline, and certainly NSFW.
He's the guy that brought about Wikipedia. He tried several times. For that alone I can forgive him of quite a bit. Seriously, just think about it for a moment. His baby has revolutionized the way we learn about things over the internet. And not the half-cocked ego-inflated entrepreneur trying to butter up investors sort of revolutionary, but an actual shift in the trends of the internet.
Do you remember have to trawl through pages and pages of geocities looking for info on something? Yeah, we don't have to do that anymore thanks to him. He could rape sheep on the side and I'd still have to give him credit. He could hold views out of line with my ideal. As is true, apparently he is less open-minded about porn. Or maybe he just doesn't want wikipedia to suffer the cost of serving smut.
I'm just saying he deserves some leeway.
Well, one could say that a corporation, being a fabrication of the government is a part of the government.
I'm not going to waste most of a workday formulating a beautiful post with specific, cited examples that are exactly on point.
However, it's my impression that the whole "corps with guns" thing has been done on many occasions in the past. Pinkertons shooting union organizers. Pantex forcing a judge to review documents only under armed company guard and then taking the documents away. Those are just the first two to leap to mind.
I doubt it would take much work to research a fairly lengthy article about how, in certain times and places, corporations have acted like they were the law and used forced on the public, all without reprisal.
You're right the "of course" shows just how ideologically bigoted and deluded he is. He's so blinded by his radical ideology that he completely missed the fact that most people not only don't agree with him, most people have absolutely no clue what supposedly obvious "of course" crap he was thinking.
Just for the record, I've run into him before and I can illuminate the situation. Mapkinase is not merely tightass puritanical Cristian-Taliban-wannabe (I call them Talibanabees). He is a literal Muslim Talibanabee. He wants to impose Sharia Law on the entire globe, complete with God-gave-me-a-list-of-people-to-kill. In his deluded mind everyone should "of course" have known his reasons for objecting to the image. Not only did he imagine people would "of course" know his reasons, he assumes any sane and non-evil person of course agrees with them.
I've been on Slashdot a long time, and Mapkinase one of only three people I've used the Slashdot "Foe" system on. I reserve it for people who make an explicitly admission that rational discussion with them is pointless. I think one of the three admitted to being a deliberate trolling account (not Mapkinase), but the other two (including Mapkinase) made explicit statements that they were dedicated to blind dogmatic ideology and would would simply ignore any attempt at reason and logic.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.