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.
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.
> 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.
That's actually part of the debate. Wikimedia Commons, as opposed to Wikipedia the encyclopedia, has expanded somewhat from "just the image host for Wikipedia" to being a free-content project in its own right, whose mission is to collect PD and freely licensed photography, art, scans, etc. Some of that still interacts with Wikipedia articles, e.g. for a big gallery full of Renoir paintings (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Auguste_Renoir), even though it's much more than could actually fit in the Wikipedia article, you can still think of it as sort of a supplementary appendix to the article. But many people would like to see Commons be more than that, and expand to be something like a "Getty Images of free content", which will serve as the world's repository for freely licensed media about everything. Other people think it should stick to being just the Wikipedia image host.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Arguably the Mohammed images are the most important part of educational outreach for Muslims though. Un-learning the religion into which you were born is probably more important than learning any given fact, since until you unlearn your religion you obviously have no idea how facts are attained and how they should be evaluated.
One can learn how non-religion-related facts are attained and evaluated, while compartmentalizing this so it doesn't affect religious ideas. It's awkward, and I couldn't pull it off for long, but lots of religious scientists presumably manage it.
Agree with your take on gore versus porn. I've looked at 4chan a few times, for example, and I didn't mind the "occasional" porn/sex/nudity pic but what was repulsive was the "ambush gore" pics you'd stumble across. That stuff can literally make you nauseous, give you nightmares, etc. I can't relate to what I see as the puritanical subset/movement in America, the one that protests pictures of naked boobies, sex talk, consenting sexual activities, pictures of reproductive organs but they don't complain about violence, gore, our military in Iraq & Afghanistan killing (even when accidentally) civilians & children, etc. The message I get from them is, "Sex bad -- but violence is good or at least we are apathetic about it if the victims are not American." Seems mentally sick to me, actually.
There's a whole rest of the Internet for the stuff that doesn't make the project's cut.
Excellent point. What distinguishes Wikipedia from any random webpage is Wikipedia's brand. As a reader of webpages, I find that the Wikipedia domain has heuristic value in helping me decide how useful the webpage will be for my research--and, yes, the research my children do at home when I'm not looking over their shoulders.
The lack of much forking or repackaging of Wikipedia is one thing that's been different than anticipated. It's possibly due to its large size and high edit rate, so you'd need a large community to make a significantly different fork, and then keep it up to date. But ideally the purpose of having a free-content license is precisely to enable people to do other things with it besides just read it on wikipedia.org--- if that's the only way people are reading it, the free-content license isn't doing much.
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.
Have an upvote.
The thing is this; clearly a picture of a nude woman is appropriate on the "Woman" page. Sexual intercourse could reasonably be depicted (though there is probably no need to have an actually obscene image that gets across "having sex"). Even close ups of genitals would pass as educational.
But there was something of a growing "Pornography" problem on Commons. And there is a big difference between Porn and images of genitals (or nudity). There seems no reason for:
- more than one depiction of porn, for the porn article (and even then it's reason seems stretched)
- more than one good close up of a [healthy] vagina (there are - or were - a load)
Why shouldn't a comprehensive encyclopedia include multiple articles about different kinds of sexuality, different varieties of pornography, etc.? How to illustrate them we can argue about, but it seems strange to argue, as Wales seems to be coming close to at some point, that, say, BDSM isn't an encyclopedic subject. That, despite the fact that many people have gotten their PhDs writing about it, and there are dozens of scholarly books studying it (it makes up a large part of Michel Foucault's writing, for example).
I've always thought that Wikipedia needed a way to move articles to a non-notable fringe instead of deleting them. The porn-star listing could go there, and the deletionist controversy would lose a lot of its urgency.
In other words, lazy evaluation of compromises -- because we all have different ideas of what we want an encyclopedia to be.
First, there is an issue if an organization like a school or workplace wants to prevent the viewing of pornography. If wikipedia hosts pornography, it risks being blocked in places where it belongs.
Second, there is the question of child pornography, which has been alleged.
Third, your belief that "As long as adults respond appropriately to the potentially misleading information that porn has exposed kids to, any harms that is done is prevented" is not universally shared, so it isn't surprising that some people will feel differently.
For all of these issues, one needs to ask oneself if the benefit from hosting a certain image is worth the drawbacks. Some images simply have no academic value.
Wikipedia hosts depictions of Muhammad, with which it risks getting blocked in entire countries. Strictly speaking they are not necessary in the articles, not the least because they're probably not historically accurate. Do you think they remove them?
Necessary is not the same as having academic value. I think depictions of Muhammad have significant academic value.
Your point is a good one, though. I'd have to think about this more to come up with a good general principle. (I just don't think that principle is "allow all possible data to be stored on wikipedia/wikicommons".)
You are attacking a straw man. Does an article on STDs need a hardcore porn picture? Of course not. That's not what we're talking about here, you are attacking a straw man.
From the article:
"Sanger sent a letter to the FBI earlier this month outlining his concerns and identifying two specific Wikimedia Commons categories he believes violate federal obscenity law."
"The first category, entitled “Pedophilia,” contains 25-30 explicit and detailed drawings of children performing sexual acts. The category was created three years ago. "
"The second, “Lolicon,” provides cartoons similar in detail and depiction. One of the more egregious cartoons shows a rendering of a young child about to perform oral sex on a much older man."
It's hard to defend that, or make it sound like it is "mundane".
Clearly it would be hard to explain to a kid (especially one who has already had the birds&bees chat) why those images existed and what they depicted.
It's a question that stymies me still!
The problem is there is nothing technically illegal in those images. They have historical value, there is also value in keeping them as historical record. What is served by deleting them?
Gratuitous pornography is, obviously, another matter - but that doesn't cover these. Because what this originally started as was a troll by Sanger - and he has ended up with the exact reaction he wanted...
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.
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.
I don't know if you've ever worked on Wikipedia, but in my experience, they get really, really pissed when you mention any kind of obfuscation of "objectionable" content. Of course, now that Godking Jimbo has gone an anti-porn crusade, the story might be different, but just look at the talk page on clitoris and you can see the rabidness with which they defend graphic depictions coming out of nowhere.
It's not that the content shouldn't be available or that a photograph of a clit isn't appropriate for the article, it's just that unsuspecting users may not want to be innocently clicking "Random Article" and end up with a picture of a vagina on their screen, you know? But the Wikipedia people don't know.
