Of course any article with the word 'paedophilia' is bound to arouse (?) the attention of admins. But there seem to be a whole slew of articles, generally with 'pro' slant, that have escaped attention

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_disparity...l_relationships Age disparity in sexual relationships

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty Pederasty - it's OK if you can find a picture of ancient Greeks doing it. It's been around for years, it's fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rind_et_al._%281998%29 Academic research says its OK!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_the_Renaissance Pederasty in the Renaissance "Florence in particular was famous for its high incidence of pederasty."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_pederastic_couples Historical pederasts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederastic_couples_in_Japan Pederastic couples in Japan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederastic_co...sical_antiquity Pederastic couples in classical antiquity

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece Pederasty in ancient Greece

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederastic_filmography Pederastic films

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos Eromenos - more Greek pedophilia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books..._or_adolescents List of books portraying sexual attraction to children or adolescents

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_pederasty Athenian pederasty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_pederasty Albanian pederasty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_the_Middle_East Pederasty in the Middle East and Central Asia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_pederasty Spartan pederasty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Victorian_pederasty Victorian pederasts - a whole category.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia - Ephebophilia, sex with adolescents, but not boys, thus OK.


[edit] plus pederasty pictures:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pederasty

[edit] I have an acid test for this sort of thing: would I let this editor baby sit the children?

In a development of this, Petra Schelm has been blocked for claiming that some users (e.g. Haiduc) are sympathetic towards paedophiles.



Petra points out that



This all seems to be a license for paedophiles. So long as you don't actually say you are a paedophile, you can be sure that anyone who accuses your edits, or your user page, is paedo-friendly, will be instantly blocked.

Once again, as Lar reminds us, there is no Due Process on Wikipedia.

In what way does his userpage imply that he intends to write such articles in a way that is favorable to those subjects? Petra did not cite any edits.

This notion of a person's motivations or intentions is interesting, especially when the only available remark on the point is someone else's haphazard theory of mind regarding another person's otherwise unexpressed thoughts, beliefs, feelings, desires, or intentions.

This is one of the seeds of lunatic social drama.

And in some cases, outright lied about other users having pro-pedophile user pages.

Notwithstanding that Petra was an obvious sockpuppet, or that he was mischaracterizing the articles (for example, on the "list of songs" artcle, Petra was arguing that they should be changed from "Child attraction" to "child sexual abuse", even though most of the songs never involved any child sexual abuse".

To me, the biggest shame of the pedophile related articles on Wikipedia is the rampant thought police on both sides. Anti-pedophiles are on some holy crusade to scorch this awful scourge from the face of the Wiki-earth, and by god anyone who opposes them is a pedophile themselves. Pro-pedophiles are unwaveringly certain in their dogma that there is nothing wrong with them, and that if everyone else tried it, they'd like it, and besides, all freakish groups should be accepted on the new, tolerant happy funland Wikipedia.

Both sides are retarded and deserve to be put out to pasture. If you have nothing better to do with your time then fight over pedophilia on Wikipedia, then you are a drain on the economy of your home nation.

I'm going to regret that quote. There may not be any Due Process but that doesn't mean that things shouldn't be done if they need doing.

I hope you don't come to regret it, Lar.

It helped me appreciate that my case wasn't just a one-off fluke, but fairly normative in terms of the absence of due process.

And having acknowledged it, I hope that our conversations going forward will consider the consequences and remedies of this shortcoming in terms of policies, practices, and ethics.

!!!!!

Here is an AfD for one of the articles on a slightly related subject, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Art...tic_filmography containing the word 'pederasty' , which some people seem to be very keen to build up into an enormous category http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pederasty which is enormous when you see the size of some of its sub categories, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:History_of_pederasty that could be an average one for all I know, I have certainly happened to notice it before.

Forgive me, but I have children of the age group vulnerable to paedophiles, and I don’t mind draining the economy of my home nation on protecting them. I spend a lot of my time and money on educating them and protecting them, so I don’t see any extra work as being more of a drain than anything else. Some of the editors mentioned by Petra, Haiduc for one, have some very strange agendas. The tendency of Haiduc’s edits seems to be ‘normalising’ pederasty by, for example, implying it was standard practice in other countries or historical periods. E.g. from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_pederasty





Is this material actually harmful? Well, if it has the intended effect of normalising this activity, or making it less easy to challenge it, then it is harmful.

Hrmmm.... Petra (Rock) vs Haiduc (Outlaw). Sounds like a Western or something.

That only "normalizes" it in the sense of making it seem acceptable if you do not believe there are aspects of human history that the world should be ashamed of.

In other words, for you to say that documenting a historical practice "normalizes" pederasty is equivalent to saying that documenting the holocaust - or historic European antisemitism - "normalizes" killing Jewish people.

I'm looking forward to the day when the editors who are writing the article on "War" struggle to "normalize" it and make it look like a glorious rather than a shameful feature of human civilization.

I didn't say 'documenting a historical practice'. I said 'implying it was standard practice'. There are all sorts of other techniques that can be used.

Six of one...

So protect them. Shield what they watch on TV, monitor their internet usage, etc. But your right to protect your children from pedophiles only extends so far as your authority as a parent; which is to say, that it does not give you the right to censor information from others, or modify it to suit your own agenda.

Just the same way, it does not give pro-pedophiles the right to censor out things like sex offender lists, or to refer to molestation of children as "harmless fun", when it is in fact child abuse. Pro-pedophiles have a right to their beliefs (mitigated by statutory and moral limitations on how they can act on their beliefs), but their right to their belief structure only extends so far as their own person. It does not give them a right to preach pedophilia on an encyclopedia, nor does it give them a right (as I mention before) to engage in child abuse.

The problem is that both sides want to make their view the only view, and since children are involved (for the anti-pedos) and thoughtcrime (for the pro-pedos), by god, they'll fight to the death before budging an inch.

In the US, we have a major problem with parents having a lack of responsibility for monitoring their children's behavior. But that doesn't excuse an overstepping of the bounds to monitoring and controlling other people, who are not their children's, behaviors. That's a duty of the state, not of individual people.




Dulce et decorum est....

To clarify - my point, which you seem to have missed is that "implying it was standard practice" does not inherently carry with it any implication that it's not wrong or that the standard practice - if it was in fact standard practice - in those other time periods was not shameful.

You raise many difficult issues. I have no problem with people preaching or publishing points of view. Some of the articles by Haiduc or Sadler are thought provoking and interesting - check out 'Britten's Children' on Wikipedia. But this is material which is so clearly OR, it should not be on an encylopedia like this.

On the other point you raise about 'standard view', you are correct, and I don't have time now. Roughly: there are certain cultures and views which your reader is guaranteed to approve of, endorse or agree with, and certain things he or she is guaranteed to hate. Certain things are in between, and you can get approval or disapproval. So, take rainforest indians. These are good, and get Wikipoints. Suppose I mention a certain tribe of them, who are also vegetarians (good), who protect the environment by worshipping trees (very very good), who indulge in Shamanistic practices (nearly at the top of the Wikigoodness scale) while under the influence of peyote (bang, the meter has exploded with wikipointness). Then you mention they practice paedophilia. Well, that must be good, too.

The tenor of edits by Haiduc are like that. Not as far as rainforest indians, as far as I know. But he claims nearly every great artist or writer in history is a paedophile (Jules Verne, Walt Whitman) as well as the great renaissance artists. Practically every person who has developed the course of Western civilisation is the abuser and buggerer of adolescents.

Responsible Child protection is a process developed through years of trials and studies by professional organizations. Also, the responsibility of society to protect children runs far deeper than individual parents' monitoring their own child's behavior. It is the duty of organizations such as Wikipedia which makes claims to "education" to seek advice from professional groups as to how to best cope with this situation. Most meet this duty. Wikipedia, of course, is led by a combination of hubris, arrogance and nonsense, and refuses to adhere to professional norms.

Jimbo Wales and other Wikipediots have repeatedly denounced teachers who question Wikpedia's usefulness in the classroom. At the same time hosting a website, Wikipedia, which exhibits wanton irresponsibility on the key issue of child protection. Wikipedia also allows 12 year olds to administer its site, and a 15 year old is now one of the select few in the Wiki-Council.

That situation, and the sheer hypocrisy on show is unacceptable. It is left to sites like this to uncover gross breaches of Child protection standards on WP, as there is no professional organization on hand to do it. And all the while, Jimbo Wales swans around talking breaks with Richard Branson and earning $95,000 a go giving speeches about how wonderful his website is.

I suppose you're just constructing an arbitrary example, but I feel compelled to observe that no hunter-gatherer or horticulturalist group practices vegetarianism (nor do most agriculturalists, by choice), nor is peyote found in any rainforest. Pedophilia, well, it's all in the definition" it is of course completely normal for post-pubescent or near-pubescent girls to be valid sexual partners for adult men, only very recently has this changed, probably due to industrial society's need for extended formal education. People everywhere occasionally violate the sexual norms of their own group, but generally, we can state that female actual children are hardly ever acceptable partners. Institutionalized homosexual pedophilia is mostly limited to New Guinea and some nearby islands. Still, these examples are interesting because they suggest that, where society institutionalizes it, all the males will happily participate, while at the same time seeking wives and raiding enemies for women just like anybody else.

A good rule of thumb is to apply extreme skepticism to any claim that "tribal people", "indians", "aborigines", etc. are tolerant about something or another, especially when mustered in service of a contemporary socio-political claim. Most of the time, the claim is simply false, or at least wildly distorted and misunderstood. Always ask, "which group?" and don't settle for anything less than a specific ethnonym and location. If this first question cannot be answered, the claim can be dismissed out of hand. If it can be answered, that typically narrows us down to one or two ethnographies which can easily be checked (and anyone serious enough to have read these will probably be able to provide an author as well.)

Sorry if that's off-topic.

Yes, but here's the hick: nobody knows what was standard practice, because nobody living today was in the bedroom back then.

It would seem, according to some sources (especially Michel Foucault, who should have been expected to take the "pro" position, given the sexual equation), that "pederasty" in ancient Greece was a chaste, but emotionally intense "moral preoccupation" concerned with controlling certain aspects of a youth's personality to create ideal citizens. Others have suggested that actual "hanky panky" took place. What did happen? Who knows? But most likely, probably a small percentage of men had sexual relations with a small percentage of boys and the rest of the time, it was a civic version of "cub scouts" or any other number of "youth groups" that exist today.

The main problem I have with the article List of historical pederastic couples is that I know that, without any doubt possible, Jean Cocteau was not the lover of Raymond Radiguet. The idea, if you know anything about Cocteau's life, is simply preposterous. I have, in my own research, examined the sources which cited for this information (Michel Larivière, Homosexuels et bisexuels célèbres, Delétraz, 1997
# ^ Charles Shively, "Cocteau, Jean" in glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture ) and both of them are based on gossip in Paris at the time which is not at all linked to letters or writings of either Radiguet or Cocteau.

Two seperate editors (Musikfabrik and Gretab) have tried to fix this, using sources published by Cocteau himself. The rightsholder to Cocteau's Estate, Pierre Bergé, has also come out saying that there was no romantic relationship between Cocteau and Radiguet...and yet, this continues. Why?

Now, I could correct this using my sources, but since none of them are published, it would qualify as Original research, so....what's the point?

But it is irritating to see two people being called pederasts when you know that nothing of the sort took place!

Worse yet, the editors who have inserted patently false material refuted by definitive (but not yet published) materials will insist with a straight face that the false (and usually defamatory) content remain in the article until the subject (or professional biographical researcher) publish the missing exculpatory evidence.

In one case, where the subject of a BLP went to the trouble of publishing his own disclaimer of false characterizations attributed to him by rabid WP editors, the best that WP could do was to add a brief note linking to the subject's disclaimer, while leaving the false claims in the article.