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Wikimedia Confusion Swirls In Wake of Porn Charges

Posted by kdawson on from the crisp-execution dept.

Contridictory stories are circulating after Fox News's pursuing of Wikimedia Foundation for hosting pornography reportedly resulted in Jimmy Wales personally removing some pornographic material from its servers, then giving up his special editing privileges under pressure. Fox News reported that Wikimedia is "in chaos"; this report was picked up by VentureBeat and others. Wales denies that there is any chaos (any more than usual, that is) at Wikimedia. The Fox News report apparently relied on a single unnamed source, and Wales said, "They don't even bother to contact me before publishing nonsense." The background: on April 27 Fox News published an exclusive report about porn on Wikimedia servers, then followed up by contacting organizations that had donated to Wikimedia to ask them what they thought about it. In the aftermath, Wales took a position in support of purging porn from Wikimedia Commons. This all started when estranged Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger contacted the FBI with an allegation of child porn on Wikipedia.

5 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Internet Wars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh, good. Seems like we haven't had a proper internet war since Usenet vs. Scientology or vi vs. emacs.

    Oh well, at least the right people usually win. What would've happened if Scientology or emacs had won?

    1. Re:Internet Wars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      When I start emacs, I don't even get a place to type text. Just a menu offering a bunch of ways to get help. The help screen uses completely separate (+unintuitive and severely limited, I might add) keybindings. The opening menu mentions something about "visit new file", which not only sounds like some sort of Microsoft Bob jargon for thinking good thoughts about one's day, but also, as a special bonus, when selected it opens a little prompt at the bottom that says "Find file: ~/"

      At least with vim, if you try to treat it like a sane editor, it is very likely to start working accidentally.

    2. Re:Internet Wars by Bugamn · · Score: 5, Funny

      Hey, that's how I started using vim for coding C:

      nclude

  2. Or, in other words... by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 5, Funny

    [citation needed]

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  3. Re:Fox News vs. Wikipedia by sa1lnr · · Score: 5, Funny

    Murdoch against porn?

    http://www.page3.com/