Slashdot Mirror
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."
Shut up, Wales. If you want to have a walled garden instead of a publicly editable resource, then why don't you work for Steve Jobs instead of Wikipedia? This is not just about what you call "pornography", but about everything the deletionist front has censored so far.
I've probably donated roughly $100 over the years since 2004, but I can't continue giving money to a place with a clear conservative and corporate philosophy. If you act like a for-profit, maybe instead of soliciting donations you should jump the shark and actually commercialize the project.
As opposed to Nancy Pelosi??
Wales is like Peter Mandelson in the UK: a cunning, hypocritical architect of a corrupt organisation who always bounces back because he's engineered social and political relationships such that everyone interested in power would have their ambitions quashed (at best) if they were to turn against him.
Fortunately, if you disregard those with personal interest in Wikipedia's success and the loyal editors who haven't learnt never to count the sunken cost, Wikipedia is regarded as fair and balanced as Fox News on anything mildly controversial. For everything else, it's a bargain basement textbook and trivia compendium.
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.
It doesn't "depict" anything, because it's a book, not images. It does refer to acts such as incest, but not in a way that anyone would consider pornographic – it's stuff like "and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father" (Genesis 19:33, KJV). It speaks about sexual acts only via heavy euphemism, never explicitly.
I'd also like to know what "child sexual acts" the Bible even refers to. I can't think of any, offhand. I don't think anyone minded pedophilia in Biblical times (or, indeed, any time pre-1900) the way we do today, but I don't recall that it's mentioned anywhere.
If you want to say it promotes sexism or homophobia, of course, no argument there.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin