I've been thinking about some various ways I might insert some photos into Commons (I'm not banned there yet, am I? nope, not yet, Greg -- your work is simply too magnificent to ban you), but I want to explore new territory.

What are some of the well-known phenomena that lack a truly useful and suitable image on Commons?

I'll start the list:

• Drool / drooling (Commons offers only tasteless and unsuitable images for this human behavior)
• Lovers' quarrel (there's nothing there)
• Qualitative research (that ain't what qualitative research ever looked like to me)
• Fingernail clippings (yeah, don't laugh)
• Passing lane (that's not my idea of a passing lane)
• Flovent (or, should I say "Fluticasone propionate"?)

You see, for that last one, I could don my Wikipedia Review.com t-shirt (okay, so first I'd have to get one made), then demonstrate (photo and/or video) how one uses a Flovent inhaler.

Besides these gems that I've seeded your minds with, what else we got?

Really? All that work, and all that humor, and not a peep? This message board really is going downhill.

Peep.

Hey, get out of the Easter candy. Easter's not until tomorrow!

That was humor? Considering the many photos of the many body functions and medical thingies we've seen gallerys of, I just presumed you were making lists of odd lacunae. I was going to searching for some things I can think of, but decided I'd rather not before dinner.

The thing about COMMONS is that since post 1923-US photos are generally copyrighted, anything that WP users cannot generate for themselves is going to be sadly lacking on Commons. That means you can get government photos of government personnel doing all kinds of things, but if you need an illustrative photo of a state functionary like a fireman or paramedic or highway patrol officer doing something, the pickings are mighty slim. Another bad area is photos of semi-famous dead people, which are usually zealously guarded by their families. Look at the poor illustrations in John Steinbeck, for example. And the recent great atomic force micrographs of molecules generated by IBM are copyrighted by them, and although they're willing to let anybody use them for specific purposes, they're surely not going to release them to COMMONS under a GFDL, so most of the best illustrations of AFM molecular stuff can't be used in AFM articles. Very frustrating.

Wikipedia: Illustrating that half the human race has a vulva they can photograph, but only IBM can get decent pictures of a molecule, and you can't use them.

Many of those images don't even match the subject. Why is a picture of a laboratory considered part of "qualitative research?"

There are so many pictures of and categories related to sex on Commons, I'm surprised the Wikimedia servers can handle it.

[NSFW] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Sex

Ugh, this is wrong on so many levels.

[NSFW] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gay_sex

[NSFW] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Anal_sex

You, err, seem to spend a considerable amount of time looking for/at porn on Commons. Not that there's anything wrong with that, just sayin'.

You're deflecting. No different than a man in a public setting saying to a naked woman "You need to put some clothes on" only for the woman to say "You shouldn't be looking at a naked woman. You must be a pervert." Typical Wikipedian deflection of the issue at hand. One of those pictures isn't yours, is it?

Why do "educational" websites like Commons and Wikipedia exhibit so many forms of porn? That's the central argument I'm trying to get at. I shouldn't be able to search for "sex" and be overwhelmed with photographs of people's genitals (or lack thereof). How does all these pictures of sex, genitals, orgasms, etc. contribute to any so-called educational project like Wikipedia? I can understand one picture of a penis, one picture of a vulva, one picture illustrating oral sex, etc., but so many pictures that they have to put into sub-categories? That makes no sense whatsoever. Commons has been turned into a free porn site and you don't have to go too deep to find any of it.

I don't know if this has been linked in past discussions of porn on Commons, but list of top viewed pages on Commons is almost completely sex-related. That data is from December when I poked Henrik about updating it. Before that the data in it was far older, but still had the same pattern.

Nah, I just noticed that you'd commented on this same topic a few times recently. And looking through some of your past posts, you've commented on this issue before. It was mostly a joke, simmer down.

Any site that allows free uploads will be a haven for porn. YouTube has issues with this. ImageShack and every ImageShack-like site has issues with this. Flickr has issues with this. Etc. That's the nature of the Internet and people who use the Internet. The images certainly have a place in an educational website. It'd be completely remiss to not include a picture of a penis or a vagina or an anus. Some of the images are currently complete shit quality-wise, but that's what you get when you don't pay people. If there's a central argument you're getting at, I'm not seeing it.

Uh, kindly, what the hell were you expecting? People have made reasonable arguments in the past that searches for terms like "Pearl necklace" ought not lead (directly) to the sex act, for example. But if you type "sex" into an image search engine, I think there's a reasonable expectation that you're going to see penises and vaginas. Come on.

By illustrating the concept. Providing a graphical (and sometimes graphic) representation of the thing being discussed. "A picture is worth a thousand words," etc. As I said, often these images aren't high quality—most of them are pretty awful—but that doesn't mean they aren't educational.

I can't really tell if you're raaaaaaging against categorization or the fact that there are multiple images of the same thing. I'll assume the latter.

One picture usually isn't sufficient to cover a topic like penises. You have black penises and brown penises and white penises and cut penises and uncut penises ... and those are just for humans. Then you have elephant penises and donkey penises and whatever else. The same is true for vaginas and many other things.

The difference is, smartass: YouTube and ImageShack etc. try to delete the crap images.
Wikipedia just lets the crap, "educational" or not, sit and fester.

Does anyone remember the "Bad Image List"? Didn't a bunch of those images get deleted about 1 1/2 years ago? Then why is the list getting longer and longer, even after the flap? Oh, riiiight, they're "freely licensed images" and it's okay to host them, even if they have no value in your "encyclopedia".

Ask not for whom the bell tolls......

To be fair, if you follow discussion on Commons noticeboards, you will see that there is an effort to fight back the tide of worthless images. There are also some Commons users who regularly contribute very good quality images (I have seen examples of online businesses selling those free images, and not even bothering to credit the creator).

After I was sent into wiki-exile, I created a Commons image gallery on a subject that interests me, using mostly images already on Commons. Some of those images were of good quality, and some not so good. There were also images I would have liked to use, but the image quality was just poor. I also, for the same image gallery, I uploaded some images, that I thought helpful to the gallery, from old books. I had intended to reorganize the image gallery, and add text for all the sections. But after few arguments with Lar on Commons noticeboards, on subjects that had nothing to do with the image gallery, I stopped work on that project. I do still occasionally upload some images that seem interesting to the gallery.

So what you find on Commons is limited by both what is there, and (particularly) by what you look for. Also, Commons has many of the same problems as Wikipedia, including conflict areas, and administrators who take pleasure in being able to get away with acting like dicks.

A problem I often encountered, when I was creating an image gallery on Commons, is the level of Commons licensing required:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...ptable_licenses
There were a lot of good images I could have uploaded from Flickr, and elsewhere, that did have commons licenses, but did not meet this Commons requirement: Commercial use of the work must be allowed. There are a lot of people who make their images freely available who are not willing to allow free commercial use of their images. The result is an average lower quality of images than would otherwise be the case.

It occurred to me that I should add a link to the actual commons licenses:
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses

Per Eric Barbour: if YouTube has a problem with porn it's very difficult to tell. I don't think I've seen even an exposed boob there. Which, when you think of it, is the reason why YouTube remains a useful website, even if 99% of it is dreck. I'm pretty sure there is a lesson there...

As for the need for 97 images of a vagina: there is none. One, maybe two, at the outer limit three -- and it is best that each one illustrate some aspect that can't be captured in the others. Rather than images for anatomical subjects, I'd suggest diagrams. Small, but important, details are easily lost in a straight-up picture. Maybe the YouTube/flash approach of interactive annotations? Whoops! That's one of those Ideas!

Anyways, the second order problem at Commons is the same one as at the other wikis: a lack of editorial restraint. Like everything else, there should be a careful selection process at work, with a strong bias towards quality and not quantity. If you peruse Commons, the subjects that are covered "properly" (so to speak) are the ones that have relatively little, but very high quality content.

That's an easy one to solve though, relatively speaking -- just erase the crap. Or better, only show content on Commons that is in active use by another project (whoa! another idea!). The more difficult one is the first order problem: the purpose of Commons itself. It was defined as being a container of created content. Instead, it should be a container of content creators. Talent is the most desirable, most valuable, thing here.

But there it rears up again, the dreaded Elitism. Some people are better with a camera, better with Adobe Illustrator, better in general as content creators, and these people can't be coddled or encouraged ... instead, the low-brow dimwits who can google up titties and people fucking each other are given the right of way.



The evidence is then against you: go right now to the English Wikipedia and enter "sex".

I like this solution. Better would be to remove all traces of human reproduction from this and related articles. Make the porn harder to find. The kids will enjoy the search all the more, and everyone else will enjoy the break. What more can you ask for?



A picture may be worth one thousand words, but three is also only worth 1,000 words. The big question is what any further images are worth, not the initial one. It is indeed possible that 5 pictures are worth 5,000 words ... but these images must be chosen with care.



This is exactly what I'm talking about: these details are unimportant, and best left to text. It's easy to get lost in the megapixels, while it is good to encourage more abstract thinking in your readers.

It's how they get smarter. Which is the whole purpose, no?

One of the reasons I let my Commons adminship lapse is that I got tired of meeting resistance to the idea that content that cannot credibly serve any educational purpose should be deleted. That, and the recognition that Commons was being taken over by the same idiotic governance problems that plague the English Wikipedia, and so if I stayed there I'd be dragged into the same pointless dramas that led me to leave Wikipedia.

Good lord; that list was an eye-opener. Obviously Jimbo has gone from leading a soft-porn site (=Bomis) to leading a hard-porn one (=commons) instead.

I said they have issues with porn being uploaded to their site that requires them to deal with it. Just like ImageShack is forced to deal with it, just like Commons is, just like Flickr is. Apparently there are even concerted efforts occasionally to upload porn to YouTube. Their policy is to delete it, other sites have different policies. The point is that people uploading porn to places where it's free (and easy) to do so isn't exceptional.

Conversely, I don't see a real need to care if there are 97 images of vaginas in a category. Commons is an image repository. It's expected that they'll house images, often a lot of redundant ones. What's your point?

Again, you don't pay people and you expect professional work. The lack of it shouldn't be surprising.

Commons is a repository of images. What the hell would the point be of hiding the content that makes up the entire purpose of the site? Good grief.

Semantics, brah. The Joy was (presumably) referring to sexual intercourse. What's there at the top? A picture of it?

I can ask for an abolishment of this radical Puritanical bullshit, surely. Remove all traces of human reproduction from an encyclopedia? Come on.

Sure. If there are encyclopedia articles being overrun with galleries of pictures, the images should be removed. But we're discussing Commons, which has a singular purpose of housing free media. You're suggesting removing the galleries of content because....

I figured you were joking, but I just wanted to drive home that I don't look up this stuff for pleasure. There's nothing pleasurable about electric vaginae (though, in the words of James Bond, "that depends on your definition of 'safe sex'.") The issue of porn on Commons and Wikipedia has been discussed many times, but hardline libertarian Wikipedians have a tendency to shout down the criticisms here, which explains my defensive nature.

YouTube, ImageShack, Commons et al. do have some troubles with porn as all free community sites do. Since Google took over, they've been quicker at getting the stuff off YouTube, but it is still an issue. The biggest problem with these sites is the heavy reliance on volunteers to mark offensive content. If they don't report it, how can anyone ever find it to remove? Then there's the ones who mark things offensive when it's not offensive (by the terms of service) as acts of revenge. The wisdom of crowds, indeed!

Are you suggesting that Commons is a Noah's Ark of penises? I don't see why you need different penises for every race. Unless it's illustrating genital herpes or scrotal elephantiasis, wouldn't one picture of a healthy penis be sufficient for all the Wikimedia projects discussing penises? Commons does have line drawings which are good enough to explain things without the need for graphic or real-life pictures. You don't even need a picture of a real penis to explain what a penis is. Biology and anatomy books don't go into as much detail as Wikipedia.

I should be clearer: I think most of the images currently being hosted are completely shit quality. I certainly wouldn't spend my time uploading them. However, they're free content and most are not bad enough to warrant deletion, especially in the absence of a better alternative. Occasionally, that better alternative is having no image at all, when the image is unreasonably poor or distasteful. But for most of these images, they don't reach that level. They're just poor quality, not offensively poor quality.

One picture of a healthy penis might be sufficient, but I don't see an issue with multiple pictures of healthy penises, at least not on Commons. If the Penis Wikipedia article were covered in dozens of images of penises, that would be unacceptable. For Commons, that's the name of the game—housing a repository of images. Just like there are multiple images of the same kind of bird or cat or building or whatever else. And Commons has been (somewhat) proactive in deleting excessive numbers of images of the same thing, see for example Template:Nopenis.

If Commons were putting these images on the Main Page, it would be a problem. If they were putting the images in inappropriate categories like "Category:Rainbows," it would be a problem. But to put multiple images of vaginas in a category called "Vagina" ... I just don't see why it's a problem or noteworthy.

Supply and demand.

Commons has an excellent collection of images of ships from the Imperial Japanese Navy and other navies as well. Many of the images of the Japanese ships weren't widely available in the west before Commons came around, but Japanese participants have apparently been able to scan and upload many of those images from Japanese picture books. I've seen people mention a couple of times on WWII-related discussion forums the treasure trove of these images on Commons.

People have uploaded pictures of more mundane items also. Before anyone says anything, I recognize that some people might find the pictures of the ice cream more interesting than the pictures of the Japanese navy ships.

I don't think I understand.

Commons is a repository of images to be used for the Wikimedia Foundation's educational projects, not for terrible artists and weirdos to place their "free" work (and you really have to question why someone would upload such things anyway, particularly if it is very graphic or showing a sex act). Just because "information is free" does not mean it's good information. One good quality image of a penis should be enough for all the projects to adequately explain what a penis is. There are 91 files on Commons under [NSFW] the Category Penis (and, I agree with you, most are terrible). Why can't Commons just choose one for all the projects to use? It's overkill to have that many. People who don't understand the goals of Commons are not going think it's for "educational purposes" if they stumble across 91 penises on it.

(I can't believe I'm arguing about this sort of thing on Easter Sunday of all times. )



Pictures of Japanese WWII ships on Commons is a good thing. Not only does it help all the WMF projects, but it can be used by other sites for educational and historical purposes. If Commons focused more on important historical pictures like those and less on the wangs, I might actually donate to keep Commons alive.

Remind me never to come to you guys for suggestions like this.

There's nothing on flesh-eating bacteria or a proper grilled cheese sandwich.

Sort of, sort of, and sort of.

The purpose of Commons, at least how I understand it, is to serve as a repository of free media. It's tasked with serving over 700 Wikimedia wikis, but it also stands alone. As Cla68 notes, many people access Commons for purposes completely unrelated to Wikimedia. There's a feature in MediaWiki called $wgForeignFileRepos where you can configure any MediaWiki installation to use Commons as a repository. When you put the code "[[File:Foo.jpg]]" on your personal site, it loads the image from Commons, without requiring you to upload it locally. It's a really neat feature.

So Commons isn't just serving one site like the English Wikipedia, or even 700+ sites like the Wikimedia wikis, it's serving a potentially infinite number of sites. Does that mean it needs a potentially infinite number of cock shots? No, not at all. But it does leave room for some leeway.

Is one quality image of a penis sufficient? Maybe. Believe it or not, there is some editorial work being done on some pages on some projects. The Italian Wikipedia might prefer one image of a penis while the German Wikipedia might prefer another. This is mostly subjective, and requiring all the sites to use the same image isn't necessary, as there isn't a shortage of space or anything like that.

Do people use Commons as a hosting site for images that they should be putting elsewhere? Absolutely. There is supposed to be some type of educational value to the images hosted on Commons. However, a quick glance through the repository shows that this isn't always the case. One of the reasons is that Commoners are very lazy fucks. You can say a lot of things about the people who edit the English Wikipedia, but the backlogs there get cleared pretty damn swiftly and people are generally efficient. At Commons, they stress being mellow, so a lot of maintenance work (like deleting shitty images) simply doesn't get done.

There are currently 91 files in "Category:Penis," which is a fairly misleading number. There aren't 91 unique images in there. Some are vectorized versions of images. Some are near-duplicates of other images. Some are audio files. Some are medical diagrams. Some are cartoons or rocks in the shape of something that sort of resembles a penis. What I think you may be missing is that 91 is really just the tip (of the pile). It doesn't include any of the subcategories, like "Category:Penis self-pictures (uncircumcised)." That's just one subcategory. There are many more. When you look at "Category:Penis," you're just looking at what's essentially the uncategorized penis media. (And, good grief, you should see some of the animated works.)

Some of these files definitely need to be deleted. I even nominated a few for deletion this evening. But, as I said, Commoners are notoriously slow, so it would take months or years to delete all of them without an admin or two stepping in and doing the deletions "speedily."

All of that said, if someone types in "penis" into the search bar at Commons, they will see penis. There's no stopping that, nor should there be. It's a legitimate subject to cover. Are there too many images of penises? Yes. Why? Well, as Killiondude and Ottava both noted in this thread, it comes down to supply and demand. People view the penis media more than nearly anything else on the site.

If we wanted to list all the random objects that don't currently have an image in Commons, I imagine the list could get fairly long, fairly fast. Seriously, though, some articles do need images. For example, this is an article I've been helping build recently. It needs a picture.

This is precisely why a simple container of existing images is relatively useless -- the amount of stuff that needs to exist far exceeds that which already does. Instead, Commons should be a gathering place of people who can create artwork for articles. You need a picture, you need a video, you need a diagram, you ask for one over there.

Philip Greenspun donated $20,000 to the WMF to get just exactly that done.

The WMF handed off the money to a volunteer who had never before handled grant distribution. About $900 of the $20,000 was (as far as I could see) properly disbursed to artists for their work. But the other $19,100 was returned to Greenspun when the volunteer waved her hands, almost to the point of crying, saying it was too hard to select articles that need pictures and then to pick who provided the best picture for the need.



(Joy, thanks for the grilled cheese tip. I'm off to read up on how corporate logos can be grilled into white bread.)

Well, this is the thing: the 501©3 exemption for corporations is for those entities that are "operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational purposes, to foster national or international amateur sports competition, promote the arts, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals." Emphasis is mine. If this sounds familiar, it is because I lifted it right off the English Wikipedia article.

It must be me, but I do I not see "maintaining a freely reusable collection of cock shots", or "building an open database of pornography" in that list. The closest match is the most vague -- "promote the arts". Problem with that is these images clearly don't even meet an art standard, and even if they did, it is difficult to imagine how an extant listing of freely reusable images of human genitalia can "promote the arts".

The WMF itself makes great hay out of the educational angle. Recent example:

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_...ant_August_2009

As does the Chief B^HJimbo hisself. So perhaps there is some confusion here -- they are into the education thing, you prefer the "freely reusable content" angle.

One suspects some special pleading is going on here.



The 501©3 conditions also say nothing of "supply or demand" either. Indeed, if the WMF in the business of satisfying a market demand, I'd say that being tax-exempt is the last thing they need.

One suspects that the IRS would agree, but stranger shit has happened re: tax law!

But honestly, you are getting nowhere with this head-in-the-sand WP:AGF-to-the-bitter-end brainless inclusionism argument. The nimrods uploading this stuff are not artists. They are not educators. There is no altruistic goal being sought here. The material they offer is being ignored for the most part, as anyone with a particle for a brain understands what is going on. To translate this normal human experience into wiki-speak: these individuals are trolls, they and their submissions should be treated as the attacks they are.

With every upload, they laugh at you. Right now, they are rolling on the floor as they read your apologetics. What's next? A position that Hustler is a scholarly journal? Why not?

Yes, entities that are "operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, testing for public safety, literary, educational purposes, to foster national or international amateur sports competition, promote the arts, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals." This time emphasis is mine.

Interesting this bad image list. It says that some pages are too disgusting to use except on certain pages. These often include user pages or articles in userspace such as

* File:Glans Penis by David Shankbone.jpg except on Glans penis, Talk:Glans penis, Frenulum of prepuce of penis, User:David Shankbone/BodyParts, Frenectomy
* File:Het1.jpg except on User:Privatemusings/Let's talk about sex
* File:Human penis both flaccid and erect.jpg except on Penis, User:Ryan Postlethwaite/Awards, User:Ryan Postlethwaite

Surely if it can only be used in userspace that is no encyclopedic usage?

And if this list is on English WP does that mean the photos can be used freely elsewhere?

Soup kitchens serve a market demand of "we are hungry and we need food". Should they have their tax-exemption removed?

Commons is just the soup kitchen for the under aged pervert without access to their dad's credit card or a proper search engine.

No access to GOOGLE? If they have net access, they have access to GOOGLE. Enter "pornography"

I'd like to know, if anybody can tell me, if any of the net-nanny programs really keep kids from viewing porn on the internet, and I mean much more explicit stuff than exists on COMMONS. Anybody know?

I was going to tell you to go to your local public library and find out, but I then remembered many incidents in which old men were searching for porn at their local libraries and when politicians tried to ban it the Librarian associations threw a fit. ;/

Only one picture for "cybersex" (thanks to NonVocalScream? )

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...=cybersex&go=Go

I know for a fact that despite claims in this article
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/magazine/02ETHICIST.html
the so-called filters are either not on at NYPL, or do not work, or are very easy to avoid. More than that, the librarians are not allowed to interfere with what children have on the screen.

Emphasis mine. I believe they meet this criterion.

That is one interesting political hodge podge. I could just picture all the special interest groups making sure that their thing is in there. I'm sure the pedophiles would claim that they are preventing "cruelty" to children by "allowing" them to "love" grown adult men.

So basically, you're saying there should be no distinction made for providing a basic necessity (food) vs. providing a luxury that (arguably) leads to social degeneracy (i.e., close-up photos of genitalia, in quantity)? I wouldn't have expected you of all people to try to make that argument, unless of course you're being sarcastic.

Personally, I think it's absurd for Wikipedia to be deemed a "charitable organization" for tax purposes or anything else (though naturally I wouldn't argue against their maintaining their non-profit status). Likewise, a soup kitchen doesn't absolutely have to claim a tax exemption or call itself a "charity" either - after all, the soup kitchen could be handing out copies of The Anarchist's Cookbook with every bowl, and telling people to dedicate their lives to violently overthrowing the government. But they'd still be providing a basic necessity (food) in the process, right? Wikipedia doesn't even do that.

Ah, but Wikipedia does provide a basic necessity.

Wikipedia provides endless drama.

It was a joke.



Seriously, comparing soup kitchens to free online porn should have tipped you off on that.

And really, you think I would support the porn on commons? I was the one that help try to get that stupid pearl necklace image deleted.

I thought so, but y'know, sometimes I can't always tell with certain folks...

Anyway, to get this thread slightly back on topic a little teensy-weensy bit, you'd really think they could come up with a decent photo of someone drooling, and I do mean saliva, not that other thing. I suspect some of them are concerned that any such photo will be offensive to people who are generally thought to be most likely to drool, which presumably means the elderly, and people suffering from profound mental dysfunction or retardation. But in fact, drooling mostly occurs while people are asleep on their sides, with their mouths partially open - it can happen to anybody. OTOH, nobody really wants to have their face displayed on a major website in such a pose, so maybe it's understandable that there wouldn't be a photo of it yet.

Still, if the model wore a fake mustache and a pair of black silk eyeshades, I doubt he'd be recognizable.

The Wikipedia Review t-shirt still might give him away, though.