
What should we do about Wikipedia's mature content problem? - lazugod
http://larrysanger.org/2012/05/what-should-we-do-about-wikipedias-porn-problem/
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nextstep
You know where else kids can see pornographic images? Nearly everywhere else
on the open Internet. Like this article mentions near the end, children can
easily see whatever they please with a Google Image search.

So should we pour money and time into protecting young eyes? Wikimedia
probably agrees with me when I think that this goal is probably impossible and
thus a waste of resources.

If parents can't accept that their kids will see a lot of different things
online, then they should monitor their children's online activity themselves.
Shouldn't parents be the ones who do the parenting?

And last, kids are curious. What is the worst that could happen to curious
children viewing porn on the Internet? I think the author of the post has a
strong cultural bias against depoctions of sexuality. Wikipedia also contains
many graphic depictions of violence. Isn't this much, much worse than
pornography?

~~~
lopatin
He doesn't disagree with you, one of his main points was that Wikipedia hosts
very very disgusting porn. The fact that children can find porn if they seek
it out does not mean we should be presenting it to them on a very public
website like Wikipedia. Should it suddenly be ok to post nsfl images
everywhere in society because anybody can find it if they really want to?
Because I feel like Wikipedia doing this is a step in that direction

~~~
kijin
What's so disgusting about animated GIFs of men jerking off? Every boy is
going to learn how to do that very soon. Given the abominable state of sex
education in many parts of the world, I would much rather kids learned about
sex on Wikipedia than on porn sites that grossly misrepresent the subject
matter.

Some of the BDSM and genital mutilation stuff, to be sure, is rather
disturbing. Still, those images and videos are on Wikipedia because there are
articles that explain relevant topics. It's not like they will turn up when
some kid searches for "boobs".

No, it's not OK to post nsfl images everywhere. But no, I don't think that
means we should remove them even from places where they are appropriate. Do
you want disturbing images removed from anatomy textbooks, too? Kids can
easily find those books in libraries, after all.

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jpxxx
Truly, points to the author: he cloaked his loathing well. His concern lies
somewhere between misguided and malicious.

So to the heart of this issue: What "extremely explicit" "disgusting"
"pornographic" "adult content" is he referring to?

• close-up photographs of ordinary intercourse

Oh. Foundational information on a fundamental, universal behavior that
propagates the human species. Yes, there's no reason "the children" should
ever be allowed to define human intercourse or put it in a coherent context -
best to just let them discover sex from a blinking pink banner ad.

What does this fool actually want?

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ek
This is some FUD. See WikiProject Wikipedians against censorship for why most
of what this guy says is nonsense, and for information on how Wikipedia
already allows institutions like public schools that may require filtering of
explicit content to configure it:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedians_against_censorship)

~~~
jim-greer
I don't think the filtering options you link to are realistic for public
schools. They amount to configuring your browser to not show images, configure
a skin which uses a blacklist of 'limited utility', or use a 3rd party proxy
that gets no help from Wikipedia.

> Logged-in users can use personal cascading style sheets to display of images
> selectively (explained below).

> By filtering content locally, either by configuring their web browser
> (including the possibility to display no images at all), or by setting up a
> proxy (such as Privoxy) (explained below).

edit: added limited blacklist option

~~~
r0s
By that logic installing and configuring all other computer systems will be
equally unrealistic.

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nostromo
I can't read the article because the server is down -- but people should be
aware of Larry Sanger's history regarding Wikipedia:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger>

~~~
kijin
tl;dr: Former philosophy professor who specializes in ethics and epistemology
helped found Wikipedia, but got dissatisfied with Wikipedia's "lack of respect
for expertise". He leaves Wikipedia, and ever since then, he's been highly
critical of any aspect of Wikipedia that he thinks detracts from its
credibility. This credibility, of course, is to be measured by traditional
professional standards such as (surprise, surprise!) lack of "porn".

Nothing new there. There is a certain paradigm at the intersection of ethics
and epistemology that makes it extremely difficult for people to appreciate
that a repository of information can be valuable even if it does not
explicitly recognize formal expertise. Adherents of this view always demand
formal criteria for inclusion and exclusion, and believe that an absence of
such formal criteria will inevitably lead to failure. The possibility that
armchair philosophers will never be able to come up with criteria that work as
well as the combined effect of a million ordinary edits never seems to cross
their mind.

I could go on and on about how harmful this paradigm is (I wrote my PhD thesis
on the very same topic, and yes, I'm a philosophy major) but I'll stop here
because it quickly gets boring.

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tantalor
This discussion is absurd. If an institution wanted to filter Wikipedia, they
could copy it en masse and just leave out the naughty bits. I don't think the
license could forbid that.

The fact of the matter is that censorship is not trivial. The cost of
filtering should be burdened by the censors, not the Wikimedia Foundation
itself.

Edit: Jim Greer points out that Wikipedia actually does suggest using proxies
for censorship,
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Options_to_not_see_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Options_to_not_see_an_image#Use_a_proxy_filter)

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hapless
I'm not one hundred percent sure that this is a problem. Context is important.
Pornographic material in Wikipedia's "NPOV" and encyclopedic context is
probably not unsettling to children.

If this is a real issue, and pedagogues or parents are offended, how has
Wikipedia gotten away with it this long?

~~~
planetguy
I wouldn't have thought so either, but apparently there are some folks out
there who are enjoying pushing the limit of exactly how _much_ pornography
they can incorporate into wikipedia.

I mean, do we really need an article on the subject "Cock And Ball Torture"? I
would have thought it was fairly self-explanatory. If so, does it _really_
need to be illustrated with _four_ photographs?

(You can look it up, I'm not gonna provide a link.)

I'm guessing, here, that the page exists less for the greater edification of
mankind and more for the sexual jollies of that rather narrow section of
humanity which happens to enjoy not only putting their genitals in "humblers",
"testicle cuffs" and "parachutes", but also get off on exhibitionism.

I dunno if it's "unsettling to children", but that page is sure as hell
unsettling to me.

~~~
unimpressive
>but apparently there are some folks out there who are enjoying pushing the
limit of exactly how much pornography they can incorporate into wikipedia.

Bingo. I would even go as far as to say that wiki's have this way of
attracting entire sub-cultures of contributors who enjoy sneaking such things
in wherever they can shoe-horn them. (See: Tvtropes.) On the one hand I
support wikipedia's position that they shouldn't censor the articles. But on
the other hand I don't see limiting this subtle vandalism as censorship. It's
more of quality control than anything else.

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benjohnson
There's no problem at all.

I created a content filtering firewall for conservative Lutheran elementary
school to using Dan's Guardian and it's naughty word filter.

Problem solved in 30 minutes, and the children get to see 99% of Wikipedia,
including topics like "Breast Cancer."

When we were testing the filter, we found that occasionally a topic with a
slightly naughty photo may come up from time to time, but nothing you couldn't
find in a National Geographic. We didn't care to filter it any more.

Want to do it yourself: Endian firewall on a VM.

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jim-greer
I think the issue boils down to whether kids will accidentally come across
porn - the author presents a very misleading example of a search result for
'male human'. When I search for that I get a high-quality porn-free page:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_human>.

If kids are actively looking for porn, they are going to find it. Now, it
would be nice for public schools with strict white list based domain filters
to be able to include Wikipedia as a safe site.

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aDemoUzer
It is not a problem. Let's move on.

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MartinCron
What's with the title change? There's a difference in intent between
describing a "porn problem" and a "mature content" problem.

~~~
lazugod
Because "Wikipedia's porn problem" is a sleazy title.

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Kliment
I think a good interim solution would be to have a client-side filter, browser
extension or such. Wikipedia content is very well categorized, so it's not a
classical content filtering problem.

~~~
tantalor
I was curious just how well the categories are exposed to clients. I didn't
find any HTTP headers or HTML meta tags, but a text scan for "Category:" would
do well.

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drivebyacct2
I love the comments. I can't keep my kids from seeing porn, so let's censor
Wikipedia. The logic, is just... breathtaking.

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its_so_on
Nothing. It's an encyclopedia.

