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What Should We Do About Wikipedia's Porn Problem?

Posted by Soulskill on from the make-a-wiki-about-it dept.

Larry Sanger writes "In 2011, the Wikimedia Board committed to installing a 'controversial content' filter even weaker than Google's SafeSearch, as proposed by the '2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content.' Since then, after growing opposition by some Wikipedians, some board members have made it clear that they do not expect this filter to be finished and installed. Nevertheless, Wikipedia continues to host an enormous amount of extremely gross porn and other material most parents don't want their kids stumbling across. And this content is some of the website's most-accessed. Nevertheless, children remain some of Wikipedia's heaviest users. Jimmy Wales has recently reiterated his support for such a filter, but no work is being done on it, and the Foundation has not yet issued any statement about whether they intend to continue work on it." (In case it isn't obvious from the headline and summary, these articles discuss subject matter that may not be appropriate for workplace reading.)

16 of 544 comments (clear)

  1. Not a problem by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've never seen porn on Wikipedia, because I've never looked for it. The fact that the porn is more highly accessed than other types of content indicates that we're not talking about accidental encounters. I don't see what the problem is.

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    1. Re:Not a problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      So you're saying if I go to wikipedia and search for anal intercourse artwork i might find some? what a disgrace!

    2. Re:Not a problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      The craziest thing about that is how long they had to hold the pose for the painter.

    3. Re:Not a problem by cheekyjohnson · · Score: 5, Funny

      Porn turns children into rapists. Much like video games turn them into murderers.

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    4. Re:Not a problem by ThatsMyNick · · Score: 5, Funny

      Search for forefinger (obviously NSFW) and find porn.

    5. Re:Not a problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Maybe it was just my area as a kid, but porn was the holy grail from 1st grade to 6th. Almost nobody knew what sex was, those that did primarily used euphemisms and the number of people who had sloppy parents/uncles/siblings leaving porn around were few and far between.

      Plus porn totally saved me from hooking up with some girl and making a mistake or two, so I'd say overall it's been a net plus for society! :D

      Seriously the shit people get bent out of shape over is slowly making me think we should reinvigorate american industry the old fashioned way: Pharmaceuticals for mental health problems.

      Not that anybody could afford them at current prices :D

      Eww, captcha was 'monogamy'.

    6. Re:Not a problem by doston · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Um, what? A lot of porn involves violence, in case you didn't know.

      "A lot". Got statistics on that? What part is violent? The multiple interracial gang bangs, or hard nipple tweaking? Is that violence? Is a huge cock stuffed into a small Asian woman too violent? Should legislate a ban on double anal? After all, it looks terribly uncomfortable...violent even. I guess we'd also have to define what "violent" in porn actually is. Is it all just violent because it's not on the wedding night and missionary position? Maybe we should ban sex outside marriage. This should definitely be legislated and there should be a massive witch hunt on Wiki, too.

    7. Re:Not a problem by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

      As for being in prison, my only guess is that you think watching porn makes children rapists or something, because otherwise I don't see how that leads them to prison.

      To be fair to the GP post, he was suggesting that I should show porn to my kids. That would result in me going to prison, and presumably since I'm such a terrible parent, that would result in my children being better off, ironically proving the point that porn can be beneficial to children.

      It was almost clever and funny, if it weren't so wrong headed.

      Note that I never claimed that porn was good for children, nor did I claim that porn was not bad for children. I've simply never seen any evidence that passive exposure to porn, or active curiosity about porn, causes any sort of problem for children of any age. If it's so obvious that porn is bad for kids, there should be plenty of evidence, right? So where is it?

      For the record, I have no children, and will never have any children. But if I did, porn would be way, way down on my list of concerns. Exposure to puritanical conservativism would be a much, much bigger concern. But in either case I would not react with censorship, but providing context where needed.

      My suspicion is that prohibition without evidence of harm causes far more harm than any of the things that get prohibited. But I don't have any evidence for that.

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    8. Re:Not a problem by Dishevel · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Or maybe as with almost everything people should shut the fuck up and not look at what they do not want to see.

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    9. Re:Not a problem by citylivin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "I have never learned anything and thought, "gee, I wish they would have censored that""

      What about showing rape porn to an 8 year old?

      This is why i use openDNS on my kids computer. You do realize children are not capable of making their own decisions 100% of the time right? You do realize that some things should be censored from kids so that they can have a childhood right?

      I dislike your absolute that "all censorhsip is evil". You will change your mind as soon as you have kids and see how helpless they are in the face of advertising and porn. They don't know what to make of it. Sure you can sit down and explain it, sometimes over and over, but there is no guarantee they will understand. Then when they start acting out in society, who gets the blame do you think? The parents of course!! That is who let them access this filthy stuff. Is it wikipedias fault, or my fault? Either way I want to try and manage that, since its my fucking kids and i am responsible! So I will filter my childrens net access.

      You should try and be a bit more open minded, not just "censorship is the bad always for ALL cases". This is reality. Not some first year philosophy class. You kinda need to have gone through it with kids to be able to understand i think.

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    10. Re:Not a problem by JanneM · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is why i use openDNS on my kids computer. You do realize children are not capable of making their own decisions 100% of the time right? You do realize that some things should be censored from kids so that they can have a childhood right?

      I agree. And that is your responsibility as a parent. But I do not agree that the world at large should be barred from certain subject matters simply because your child should not see it.

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    11. Re:Not a problem by Pseudonym · · Score: 5, Insightful

      All of your points (with the possible exception of #3) implicitly assume that porn is sex. It isn't, as anyone who has actually had sex can tell you.

      My kids (all under the age of 13) know about sex. They know that their parents have sex. They've seen pictures of childbirth. I let them watch The Big Bang Theory, where it's mentioned and even implied all the time. They've been to art galleries regularly since they were 2, where there's plenty of nudity.

      I don't have a problem with sex and nudity. The problem with porn is that it's not sex. It's not that it's too explicit, it's that it's not nearly explicit enough. It invariably contains no emotion, nothing about relationships, nothing about negotiation... it leaves out everything that's good about sex beyond the purely mechanical. And that's leaving aside the the fact that it compounds existing dysfunctions in our society like body image dysmorphia.

      There's a lot of emerging evidence that young adults who watched a lot of porn have problems with intimate relationships. It makes intuitive sense when you think about it, like how exclusively using Visual Basic teaches you bad programming habits, or eating a diet of junk food gives you bad dietary habits and can even permanently affect your physiology.

      That there exists "good" porn is beside the point. The vast majority of it is bad for a developing brain. They would be far better off with trashy erotic romance novels than they would be with porn, because at least they contain some actual emotional content.

      Anecdote: My daughter (when she was eight) and I were passing an "adult shop". She asked what it was. I thought about it for a moment and said: You know the annoying boys at your school who tell dumb, unfunny, stupid jokes? It's like that, only sex.

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      sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
  2. Re:links? by Eponymous+Hero · · Score: 5, Funny

    no no no -- links to the porn, obviously...

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  3. Hmmm... by SarekOfVulcan · · Score: 5, Informative

    I wonder why Larry Sanger could possibly have an interest in making WP look problematic.

  4. Browser filters, not site filters by MobyDisk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is an easy reliable technological solution to this that has been around for 10 years, but no one uses it. There is a W3C standard for labeling pages as containing porn, violence, etc. Internet Explorer had support for blocking pages based on this as far back as IE5. But no one put the meta tags in and so the filters never worked. All Wikipedia should do is have contributors properly label the media, and allow the browsers to handle it based on the user's preferences.

  5. Examples from Wikipedia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    File searches on Wikipedia:
    Toothbrush: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=images&search=toothbrush&fulltext=Search
    Human female: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&limit=250&offset=100&redirs=0&profile=images&search=human+female
    Human male: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=images&search=human+male&fulltext=Search
    Jumping ball: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&profile=images&search=jumping+ball&fulltext=Search

    Wikipedia articles:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Free_Ride
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep-throating
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_torture
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cock_and_ball_torture_(sexual_practice)