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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."
At least it's not sheep.
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.
This does raise a good question: What is a necessary amount of porn?
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
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.
and there it is, on wikipedia:
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage 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?
Hey, some of us like the professional stuff. Amateur porn has too many pimples and zits.
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.
"Necessary" is a concept that varies according to each person. To me, my 47 porn DVDs are the necessary amount.
The necessary amount of porn is mainly related to how bogus the definition of porn is.
Of course this is a big fat social red herring with the biggest problem being the nailing down of exactly what porn is.
Porn is a scary sounding word that's easy to use to quickly defame someone.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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/
I think you mean "...but I know it when I come across it."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Still better than the millionth run-of-the-mill actress with the same boob, mouth and nose job (surgery, not sexual act), dully fucking their way through a never changing script of positions, all the while moaning the same fake sounds for 15 minutes straight, which makes you think they're just running a sound loop.
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
I was going to ask how you manage to resist and remain celibate for life, now I know.
Would you like the answer expressed in Libraries of Congress, or Pallets of Kleenex?
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
He's not talking about Wikipedia. He's talking about Wikimedia Commons, which already needs a specific warning template asking people to please refrain from adding Yet More Pictures Of Users' Cocks Because We Have Enough Already Thank You.
-mkb
.. and to elaborate on this subject; I could upload every random picture I shoot with my camera or any picture my webcam takes every five seconds.
In that case it makes perfect sense to remove a lot of these pictures even though some randomly might happen to contain something interesting one day.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
So Wikimedia Commons is being overwhelmed by porn, the way Usenet was 10-15 years ago, right? Well, I'd love to see some of it, but I can't seem to find it. A search for "porn" turns up i.e. pictures of pornographic actresses, almost all clothed (an occasional one topless). "Pussy" turns up some pictures of pussycats, "teats" turns up nothing because people can't spell, "tits" and "penis" finds some stuff that's highly anatomical, "fucking" gives as its top result a fucking couple... of flies! In short, if there's any porn in Wikimedia, it's less than 1 in a million.
It seems to be all just Jimmy Wales trying to get some publicity and one-upping Larry Sanger. The whole thing is even more pathetic than Larry Sanger's original fantasy-rant.
Alright people, nothing to see here...
It's not an encyclopedia. Wales is discussing Wikimedia Commons, a related but seperate project from Wikipedia. They've already got a whole team of people who debate over what is acceptable or not at Commons:Deletion requests. This isn't about what should or should not be included - porn with no informative purpose is already subject to deletion. What Wales is calling for is a greater effort to reduce them.
Nopenis.svg
Thank you for your interest in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, a non-profit media repository with the primary scope of providing educational and informative images and media. Submissions that are low quality or do not fall into Commons' scope may be subject to deletion. One or more of your recent contributions has been identified by another Commons user as a possible image not in Commons' scope. Commons has guidelines on nudity, as a result of already having a large number of photos of genitalia, specifically the male reproductive system and the penis. If you have objections to the proposed deletion of your image(s), please see the links to the relevant deletion discussion(s) (listed above or below this message box). This message is not intended to be taken personally. Thank you for your understanding. --Explodicle
This is a real warning people get for uploading too much cock onto Commons.