

Jimmy Wales gives up administrative privileges after community backlash - derekc
http://venturebeat.com/2010/05/16/wikipedia-founder-gives-up-control-of-site-over-fox-news-kiddie-porn-scandal/

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_delirium
Fwiw, Wales posted a comment on the CNET version of this story, alleging that
the Fox News article that all these stories are based on (incl. VentureBeat's)
is misleading:
[http://news.cnet.com/8618-1023_3-20005082.html?communityId=2...](http://news.cnet.com/8618-1023_3-20005082.html?communityId=2108&targetCommunityId=2108&blogId=93&messageId=9385146)

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kiba
Those "pornographic" images undoubtedly exists on articles like Sexual
intercourse and other articles concerning human sexuality and sexual acts.

In light of the context in which images has been placed, there has been
nothing pornographic about it.

Even so, I am not sure what irreparable harm can be done to kids accidental
catching a glimpse of human sexual reproduction. As long as adults respond
appropriately to the potentially misleading information that porn has exposed
kids to, any harms that is done is prevented.

I would be far more concerned about my kids visiting actual hardcore porn
sites rather than reading mundane scholarly wikipedia article about human
sexuality, benefit/harm to society, STDs, and other such useful information.

~~~
tptacek
If you read Wales' User_talk pages on Wikimedia, you'll see that there's more
to it than just topical illustrations of human sexuality articles:

* There were "trolling" images of porn on random articles

* There was/is a "pornography project" that was/is creating a "Who's Who" of porn stars under the rubric of the encyclopedia

* It was perceived by Wales that it was becoming difficult to use the encyclopedia without potentially tripping over graphic pictures

At the end of the day, Wikipedia isn't about providing a commons for people to
store all the world's information. It is to build and maintain the world's
best encyclopedia. There are tradeoffs involved in building an encyclopedia.

For what it's worth: while I won't have a temper tantrum either way, I'm not
OK with my kids seeing porn in Wikipedia. I think the project is more useful
if it is making a good-faith effort to limit graphic sexual images.

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dschobel
Wikipedia is at the same time full of articles on all sorts of human depravity
which presumably you don't want a young child reading about.

I would suggest that maybe what parents deem acceptable for their kids to
consume unsupervised isn't such a great standard for what's worth studying and
cataloging.

On a related note, age-appropriate forks of Wikipedia might not be a bad idea
considering students are, as you point out, such a large portion of its user
base. Just leave the original one alone.

~~~
tptacek
Or, the porn partisans can create a porn-friendly fork, and leave the original
alone.

The question is, is the encyclopedic value of graphic sexual imagery worth the
cost, which is reduced accessibility of the whole project. Wales' answer,
which I agree with, is "no".

At the heart of every debate about Wikipedia policy, I see the same notion:
that because Wikipedia is on the Internet, and because it's open to everyone
to edit, and because it's powered mostly by editors unaffiliated with the
project, it "belongs" to everyone. _But it doesn't_. It's not a democracy! It
has an agenda: building the world's greatest encyclopedia. It's rational and
consistent for the project to trade openness for accessibility and quality.

There's a whole rest of the Internet for the stuff that doesn't make the
project's cut.

~~~
_delirium
Why cut just the porn, though? It's not even the most offensive. I'd say
_gore_ is the most universally offensive thing on Wikipedia, and there are
some pretty gory articles about medical conditions. So much so that I
sometimes disable images before reading some of those sections of the
encyclopedia. And there have been perennial debates about whether Wikipedia is
limiting its educational reach into the Muslim world by unnecessarily
including Mohammed images (and there are similar examples of Wikipedia's
inclusion of blasphemous or otherwise offensive content from the perspective
of other cultures).

My view would be that it makes more sense to _produce_ all the content in one
place, as one large project that's all-inclusive and has no offensiveness
standards, and then repackage subsets (no-nudity, no-blasphemy, no-Tiananmen,
etc.) if doing so would aid distribution of the result, or maybe subsets for
other reasons too. I.e. the primary focus of Wikipedia as a project should be
producing the encyclopedia, not distributing it--- the great thing about open
content is that anyone can distribute it in any form they want. It'd be great
if there were third parties dedicated entirely to distributing nicely
repackaged and curated versions of it, including, say, a version that school
libraries would feel comfortable installing on their machines.

~~~
tptacek
Gore: I agree! Some pictures of gore remove more value than they add.

Educational reach into the Muslim world: I don't care.

Your suggestion about an encyclopedia project that produces content to build
other encyclopedias with --- a meta-encyclopedia? --- is sensible. You should
start that project. I don't think it's Wikipedia.

~~~
_delirium
Well, Wikipedia _was_ intended to be that project from the start (I've been
involved with it since 2003, and that was clearly the intent at the time). A
lot of people have started using wikipedia.org as their primary encyclopedia,
but I think that's just because nobody's built anything else out of it, so
your only choice currently is to read the online snapshot of raw meta-
encyclopedia, complete with obvious "work-in-progress" banners everywhere.

Admittedly, it's unclear where it currently lies. Since wikipedia.org's gotten
so many viewers, there's a significant number of Wikipedians, and probably the
majority of the official folks at the Foundation, who think a reader-centric
encyclopedia ought to be a priority. I personally think readers should be
secondary, and producing raw content should be Wikipedia's main mission, with
some other organization (not Wikipedia or owned by Wikimedia) taking on a
reader-centric project of forging that raw content into nicely curated final
products. I'd guess most of the old-school (pre-2007 or so) Wikipedians think
similarly, but it's quite possible we'll lose out. A bit on a related conflict
here:
[http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conflicting_Wikipedia_philoso...](http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conflicting_Wikipedia_philosophies#Eventualism_vs._immediatism)

And sure, you might not care about educational outreach into the Muslim world.
But other people don't care about educational outreach to kids or adults
who're offended by nudity (I personally don't care much more about nudity than
I care about Mohammed images, though I dislike gore and spider photos). People
generally have lots of opinions on which kinds of cultural norms are more
important to respect.

~~~
tptacek
I only have one point to make in this discussion, which is: Wikipedia doesn't
have to host content for the sake of hosting content. It can make tradeoffs to
achieve its mission, which is to build the best possible encyclopedia. It is
reasonable to talk about cost/benefit for things like graphic sexual images.

That's all I've got here.

Maybe it's worth it to host graphic sexual images. I doubt it, but we'll see
where the consensus develops.

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nopassrecover
Isn't the easy solution to require logins for particularly adult content (even
if it only requires login for part of the content of an article) in the same
way YouTube does? You could also enable "mouse-overs" for authenticated users
so they don't see potentially "offensive" images straight away.

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sketerpot
That actually sounds like it would be fairly easy to add to the wiki software,
and practical as well. You could even just add a cookie to remember people's
preferences about adult images, the way Google Image Search remembers your
"SafeSearch" preferences for a while even if you're not logged in.

~~~
epochwolf
This isn't easy to add actually. The mediawiki software, last I checked,
doesn't have this capability and adding it would be a royal pita.

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gsteph22
For being an Objectivist, Jimmy Wales sure was fond of censorship...
[/AndrewRyan]

~~~
sliverstorm
Sorry, did you mean to say he was fond of complying with the law?

