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Wikimedia Confusion Swirls In Wake of Porn Charges
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.
... if Sanger saw this sort of thing coming.
It has long been known to anyone who ever tried to contribute to Wikipedia just how much off the books power Wales has. Those who spent a particularly long amount of time there might remember the whole birth date fiasco, which basically pinned Wales against himself, much to the confusion of his many disciples.
Sanger has to know Wales even better. It wouldn't be much to assume that he might have expected this sort of reaction. Indeed, this situation really threatens Wikipedia's standing as non-bias (specifically, censorship-free) and open, at least among those who didn't already know better. Could this be the straw that breaks Wikipedia? Did Sanger expect this?
Great Intellect...
Fox have successfully created a news story from nothing; the ringing up of donors is a classic. Whatever you think of Fox's agenda, they did what they do very well on this one!
You know... I went and read that link you posted about fictional writing, and with only a few small exceptions every single commenter was declaring that the punishment wasn't severe enough.
How sad.
Where would the law draw THAT line then ? Canada's law prohibits fictional writing about sex involving children... well I guess it's illegal to read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliette in Canada then. Every single line in that play is a thinly veiled sexual refference, every single word they say is flirtatious and promising of sex. Juliette goes so far as to decry having to wait longer "to be enjoyed"... and according to the script... she is 12 years old.
Times change. In the 1600's a 12 year old girl was considered a grown woman and the average age of marriage was between 12 and 15 (you know that whole wait-till-you-marry idea must have been a LOT easier when that meant 2 years after puberty rather than about 20 like now) - point is.
By modern standards, Julliete was a child, way below the age of consent for just about any country. If we ban the stories this man had, we have to ban Shakespeare... well we wouldn't be first I guess.
Hell old Bowdler actually deemed himself justified to have the audacity to rewrite Shakespeare and remove the sex...
I didn't start my comment with "I hate childporn but..." - because it's a sign off the witch-hunt that everybody who shows a little reason in these matters feel the need to do that. Stallman spoke out against the witchhunt, and got a bunch of the Novellian New-breed OSS'ers calling him a paedohphile for it.
It seems humanity will never learn, witch-hunts are never just -and whatever atrocity leads to a witch-hunt, the one thing you can be sure of is that the witch-hunt will do nothing to reduce it. All it will do - is remove justice and freedoms from a whole lot of innocent people. My claim that censorship is never a good thing rest firstly on the fact that no matter how noble it's cause, it's never effective in any positive way - but it always has many negative effects.
Thank goodness I got to study Shakespeare BEFORE we Romeo and Juliette became illegal.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Wikipedia against "child" (by USA standards, and the more recent British standards) porn
The Sun and other British tabloids have also provoked controversy by featuring girls as young as 16 as topless models. Samantha Fox, Maria Whittaker, Debee Ashby, and many others began their topless modelling careers in The Sun at that age, while the Daily Sport was even known to count down the days until it could feature a teenage girl topless on her 16th birthday, as it did with Linsey Dawn McKenzie in 1994, among others. Although such photographs were legally permissible in the United Kingdom under the Protection of Children Act 1978, critics noted the irony of Murdoch's Sun and News of the World newspapers calling for stricter laws on the sexual abuse of minors, including the public identification of released pedophiles, while publishing topless photographs of girls whom many other jurisdictions would legally classify as underage minors.[8] Controversy over these young models ended when the Sexual Offences Act 2003 raised the minimum age for topless modelling to 18.
(From Wikipedia)