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

And this...

[AnonymousClown]

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.

Re:"too much unnecessary porn"

[Ephemeriis]

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?

Re:does Wales still have any authority?

[ultranova]

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?