I noticed Larry S recently joined the board - so a big G'day from down under :-)

I thought now, for many reasons, might be a good time to make a note about the various actions I've taken to date to try and raise awareness of explicit images - I've been a fairly consistent cage rattler on this one - I hope it's pretty clear that various / many wmf types have long been aware of this problem, and yet it remains unresolved.

I saw Larry mention his desire for a serious / respected journalist to cover this - and who's to know when that could happen? When it does, I hope the following may be of interest - the open record of wiki is great from that perspective :-)

So here's a list of most areas I can recall being active in;

• 2008 sexual content proposal on en wiki
• 2008 / 09 sexual content proposal on commons
• child protection policy on en wiki (yes, this is the sum of en child protection measures!)
• 2009 essay discussing the issues
• feb 2010 - summary of many contacts with jimbo over last 18 months or so - mentioned my feeling that WMF may be breaking the law - Jimbo felt that it was not the right place for the discussion.
• 2010 - several foundation-l threads including minors administering explicit media, and raising awareness not only of explicit media available to all, but media such as an image of a 16 year old girl masturbating available to all admin.s - reply from Mike Godwin (WMF lawyer) indicating he felt the DOJ would approach him if there were any issue;
• note to jan-bart (board trustee) about 16 year old masturbating image - note was removed, and page blanked and protected

..hopefully getting this stuff 'on the record' is useful, and might encourage positive change as soon as possible.

I should also note that this attempt to setup merely a demonstration of how some 'tagging' might help places like schools restrict access to some images is proving very difficult to gain any traction - all efforts to even add a hidden template / category to files have been removed as 'spam' - see here for the gallery of images it applied to, if you're ok viewing such things.....

In other news - a couple of admin.s (Tiptoety - who's an oversighter, checkuser, otrs editor, and Axpde, who's a brand new admin) are reasonably active on commons at the moment deleting explicit images as 'out of scope' - some have stuck, some haven't..... we'll see how it goes...

Was she hot?

heh... hop on IRC and ask a commons admin for a copy of the image - does seem to me though that you, or the admin, is breaking the law in distributing or receiving said image... (in many jurisdictions)

It was subsequently revision deleted, which strikes me as a good thing.

Does that mean it was actually deleted? As opposed to deleted but admins can still see it? Can devs see it or is it really gone?

The hierarchy as I understand it.

• Currently Visible
• Not currently visible but in a past revision, anyone can see if it they look for it
• Marked as deleted but those with the "admin" permission (or above) can see it
• Marked as revision deleted and only those with the "oversight" permission (or above) can see it
• Out on the disk somewhere but not in the database (not sure how that happens) so only a dev could find it.
• Gone completely

So no, it's not actually deleted, it's deleted so only those with oversight can see it or restore it. But the fewer people that can see it, the better.

Good thing. Good enough thing? You decide.

thanks for those who've clarified the nature of the deletion - I think it's also correct to point out that you have to identify yourself to the foundation, and be over the age of 18 to be given the 'oversight' flag.

Also - tim's note (as a dev.) seems to me that he'd be perfectly willing to delete such images given a direction from the foundation - one that they're not willing to give.

A system in place to deal with such stuff would not be difficult, and there's a demonstrated need imo.

Actually, I do believe that Cary Bass and/or Philippe Beaudette have ordered the deletion of such images in the past. For example, I believe I remember that they ordered the permanent deletion of images uploaded by Misty Willows (T-C-L-K-R-D) .

Shouldn't this post be in this thread as a demonstration that the title of the other thread is true?

So, just how is this "porn roundup" going?

This story is gonna have legs, with lots of twists and turns. Jimbo cannot personally police the porn on Commons, so he will need to get the community of unpaid volunteers to subscribe to a new policy and a functional set of practices to regulate the content. Good luck with that.

[Modnote: thread cleaned of BS, which was moved to the Tar Pit.]

Well, in just the last couple hours the poll on meta has gone from around 2:1 to now 3:1 in favor of gelding him. Doesn't look good.

It really exploded from about 50-50 to about 150-50. Also this page is interesting.

207 to 69 now.

(69? Fitting, but needs pix.)

So what? I mean, who would dare to come in and close the poll? You'd need a steward to remove the flag, and they'd certainly be in for it if they took away his founder flag. The only way to make it legitimate would be to somehow get the approval of the Board and do you really think the Board is going to go against Wales?

It only takes 6 of them. It came close to happening, once. I don't think any of those people are with us anymore, though.

The stewards are already chafing to show their independence of the Board and of Jimmy. Right now they are all ignoring a demand from Jimmy to desysop a Commons admin (I won't name who; as far as I can tell the request was made privately and is being discussed privately) for reinstating an image that Jimmy had deleted. The Board is certainly not united behind Jimmy, and there's always the chance that the Board will elect not to extend his service for another term when it next expires.

Damn right. Look at the list of Commons bureaucrats.
Which one of those people do you think would vote against Jimbo? Juliancolton has already voted against removal of the founder flag, and I doubt Lar will do anything different. Cary Bass is clearly pro-Jim-bo. The others don't participate in en-wiki that I can find, and are probably not even aware of the issue.


And I think I know which admin.....

If they are "itching" to declare independence from Wales, this would be the time. And if it happens, the whole thing will start to disintegrate. One of the few things that kept people "loyal" to the WMF's goals (no matter how half-assed) was the God-King and the Wiki-Luv that followed him to every conference and meetup. Without that, it will start to Balkanize.

Anthere (former chair of the Board) votes for removal of Founder flag...

Isn't it more the case that you only really need the Board to not disapprove, in a positive fashion? Is this the same Board who sneezed out that vacuous "statement", supposedly supporting the Thought Leader?

I wonder how many of them are still with Jimbo.

And the plot thickens.

I won't claim to have a thorough read on the situation, but some of the stewards do seem to be "chafing" as Kelly put it. See Darkoneko's comment. Drini was on board before the latest actions. Millosh weighed in against removal initially, but has "reconsidered". Thogo is also for removal, but those guys just represent a handful of the 34 stewards.

I doubt any of them have the guts to actually do it. Drini might, but I doubt it. Way back in the day, he took a lot of heat for deleting the CVU, but pissing off the MMPORPGers is a different order of magnitude from the kind of heat that going after Jimbo would bring down.

If anyone did do it, I think only Sj could plausibly get away with it as a member of the board and very long-standing editor with some of the right friends. If he did, though, I think it would represent a coup after which we would have god-king Sam instead of god-king Jim. To be clear, though, I don't think Sj is the type to do it.

As god-kings go, Sj would be a damn sight better than J Wales. But my feeling is that Sj would move to establish a functional community governance model.

Jimbo is still a fantastic fundraising tool. You don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Well, if some steward came in and closed that now lopsided poll and deflagged Jimbo (doesn't that sound nasty?), then the next step would be that Jimbo would march down to the WMF office and demand a board vote to give it back (with the deflagging sysop no doubt banned for life). Struggles in the virtual world always come down to a physical struggle over the software passwords and the money that pays the salaries of the people who do the programming. Which comes down to a trespass struggle for control of office space, enforced if necessary by cops with weapons who remove people from said office buildings. In other words, a vote of the board happens, which determines who gives corporate orders. Following which, Enforcement Droid 209 blasts somebody out the window of the boardroom tower office, or something RoboCop-like of that sort. I love ED 209, that symbol of capitalism in control of computers.

So no, the WP world does not exist on its own, like Narnia or Imagination-land. I'm pretty sure that there are some people in Teh Communiteh who think it does, and that SF is irrelevant, but they're under the WP illusion that power is distributed among them. It isn't. It's held by 10 people in SF; end.

MY ringing endorsement:

# The only thing worse than an unelected dictator in charge is no one in charge. The wikis have a totally inadequate decision making structure, and simply do not respond to ethical concerns - Jimbo is (unfortunately) all we have.--Scott MacDonald 00:38, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

If they could get 80% or more it'd put a lot of pressure on the developers to follow the "bug request" to remove the founder flag. I believe it was that bug request which triggered the poll in the first place. The developers responded to the bug request with "can't do this unless you show community consensus". They might even go ahead and do it, if it's something they wanted to do anyway, although that's largely dependent on how pissed that would make Sue.

I agree with all of that. I just wonder how excited they are to write JW yet another permission slip to do what he's already done - that previous statement was conspicuously flaccid; maybe they're just not that into him anymore. The vote cited above (I believe it was Florence Devouard), supporting de-flagging, was in part justified on the grounds of keeping Jimbo out of trouble. Should they go the other way and actively affirm and authorize his methods, perhaps they also share culpability for what comes next?

Also, my understanding (which is meagre!) of how he acquired his badge is that it "just sorta happened", which is how I think they want it - I noted elsewhere the tendency to portray every new action and policy as an extension of previous actions and policies. If the "community" takes his flag away and the Board gives it back, it will be a clear decision in repudiation of established norms and slogans. More peeps will be peeved and piss off. It will give legs to the current story - an "encyclopedia" founded by a porn king implodes when he tries to take away their porn.

Just maybe they'll figure it's easier to shoot the sherriff?

Many of the files they are arguing over, e.g. File:Self breast licking.jpg and File:Self-kicking breasts.jpg, was ripped of Flickr.

These are other of the uploaders images. How old do you think the females are, or look, and have they honestly given permission for their faces and sexual organs to copy over to the Wikipedia for perpetuity?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brittsuza/4511667176/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brittsuza/4436283550/

One needs to view Wikipedia content in the context from which it came. A consideration far beyond most Porno-pedians.

I think we have to waste until the dust settles and the masturbators start uploading again ... and then we get to report back to the media what a failure it all was and how unsuitable and incapable the management is something-must-be-done-about-it etc.

I never realised there was so much hard core amateur porn on Flickr ... which makes their censor and deletion without appeal of my account --- which only contain entirely novel satyrical comics critical of Wikipedia --- even more suspicious.

Having been tipped off by someone at the Wikipedia to censor it ... they obviously share a collusion of values.

It didn't "just sorta happen"... Jimbo's following among "teh community" was starting to diminish, and the "Founder" position was the thumb in the dike. The dike has turned to mud since then.

What has gotten into you, and are you not the same schmuck who wrote this: User:Scott MacDonald/When to shoot an admiral...

But you don't actually believe all that propaganda, do you?

I put in an RFA at Commons, saying I would help clean up pornographic images that are not in use by any project.

The result so far: 14 Opposes, 1 Support.

That's about the same result you get when you propose a porn image for deletion.

I'm sure that's all true, but whence the muddy dike? Was it an official Board/whomever declaration, did some codemonkey slip it in slickwise? My original wikiexodus was prompted by a futile search for a paper trail explaining how JW got to be godking, so I'm betting on #2, but I'm happy to be educated!


Hell no, I'm twice as smart as the people in Shelbyville...

Do I believe some board members might be self-aware enough to upholster their collective donkeys? Sure, maybe, I dunno. Which part was the propaganda?

brittsuza's flickr account has been canceled. Judging from her other photos on Commons, she appears to be younger than 18.

There's an article about her on an inclusionist German wiki, where the anonymous author states "Es gibt keine Bilder auf denen sie ihre Schamlippen spreizt, keine Fotos mit Dildo , auch keine Bilder mit einem Mann etc."

There used to be, though. The photo of her with a dildo in her anus was deleted.

It's very interesting how quickly "Wikiporngate" dropped off the radar without a trace.

Let's face it, folks: apart from Fox News, the first-rank MSM are not interested in the fact that the fifth most popular site in the world, encouraged by many to be used by millions of school kids who do use it, is full of porn. Now, if the issue were framed the right way by someone like an A-list columnist or a U.S. senator or one of Wikipedia's major donors, then it would be hard for the MSM to (a) not report on it, and (b) not at least pretend to be shocked by it. But as things are, they think: it's the Internet. It's Wikipedia. Everybody knows it is not to be trusted, right? It might raise a few eyebrows, but it's not exactly news that Wikipedia has porn, right?

Well, maybe MSM reporters and other movers and shakers take this attitude, and I took this attitude until recently, but I was surprised to learn that many, maybe most, Wikipedia users do not take this attitude. They are actually shocked to learn that Wikipedia has a lot of porn.

Maybe if we create more of a grassroots awareness of what's out there, we'll see better results, and more prompt and urgent action from the Wikipedia community and management. I think some of WP management is taking this seriously, but they need more incentive to stay on top of it.

If you want to help with this, I think some low-key "guerrilla" tactics may be in order. Create a page with a zillion links to the most appalling porn, and after that a list of the points such as I was compiling here. (You're totally welcome to that. I'm sorry I didn't have time to finish that little project. I no longer have time to help with this, I'm afraid--WatchKnow and related projects are really eating up all my spare time.)

This little project needs, basically, four components to be finished:

(1) A one-page linkfest of wikiporn. This should include direct links to the worst images and articles, not just links to category pages. Bonus points for thumbnails (appropriated censored) and/or descriptions. Basically, make people who are ignorant of what's available on WP go "WTF?" and then click through to the content, which Wikipedia has decided to defend proudly and self-righteously (so, there's little chance of it being taken down). Seriously, this is what has to happen: people have to see not only that this stuff is up there, but that Wikipedians have zealously defended their policies to have such "educational material" and not even to label it as "adult."

(2) A collection of under-reported arguments, with evidence, such as I have offered above. If you develop what I've started above and post it, I will be willing to co-sign it, if it looks all right to me.

(3) This should be on one page, preferably a simple URL, but at least a reasonable short one.

(4) Finally, the "guerrilla" part comes in when you spread the word just about this page. An afternoon spent posting links to it in random places would be well spent. You could put it in all the blogs that discussed Wikiporngate like this: Did you know that Wikipedia has a huge amount of porn? Something short and enticing to itchy clicker fingers.

Of course, if you make this page and I'm signed on to it, I'll put it out on my own networks--not that they're very big. I'll bet we'll get Jason Calcanis to tweet about it; other plugged-in folks as well.

Brother, you can't see the forest for the trees.

The MSM has no idea how Wikipedia operates, nor do they care. Outside of something totally outrageous -- Seigenthaler, Essjay, David Boothroyd, the Maurice Jarre nonsense -- the site pretty much skims below the media radar. And I'd bet at least 5 out of 10 non-tech MSM journalists have no clue who Jimbo is.

The first lesson of good PR -- don't push ahead on a campaign without a strategy.

The second lesson of good PR -- don't publicize your strategies for the competition/enemy to see.

The third lesson of good PR -- get a pro to help you. PM me if you want more help there.

This is a strategy for making a specific thing happen. I am strategizing. I don't have a global strategy for improving every aspect of Wikipedia, because I'm only interested in this issue for now.

I'm not concerned about this in the slightest. How are they going to prepare for this? The whole point is that, after events of recent months, they are now publicly and ever-more-adamantly committed to their porn. They can't start removing many of the images we find, because it will be internally unpopular--nay, impossible--to do so. When we point out that they have such-and-such a policy, what are they going to do--rewrite the policy? Of course not.

I don't have time to work on this much, either with or without a PR person. I've worked with PR firms before. Sometimes they help, a lot. Sometimes they don't do anything that you couldn't do just as well yourself.

When it comes to grassroots awareness-raising, PR firms don't know as much as I, and many of us, do. Most of them are babes in the woods when it comes to social networking stuff.

Anyway, again--if you build it and it looks good to me, I'll sign it. Then, I suspect, "they will come." We'll post a bunch of links to the page and we'll see what happens.

Don't despair so quick Larry. It was significant coverage. Give it year before you even try to assess the impact. In the meantime abide events. If in the next year and significant incident relating to children on WP occurs the MSM will revisit this story with a vengeance. It is sad that we might have to wait until further harm is known, but its not for want of trying. The complete and arrogant disregard of WP for child protective concerns will eventually catch up with them.

Other (than Fox) MSM outlets have a great deal deference for technology as a whole (vaguely seen as "progressive") and accept too much of the "censorship" narrative without taking a hard look at the facts. But at least a dent was put in WP ability to mobilize that narrative to its defense. This round compares very favorably to the Virgin Killer coverage of a year ago.

Didn't anyone notice what actually got Jimbo off his ass on this issue? It wasn't a "page of links". It wasn't even "mainstream media attention". It was donors and affiliated corporations calling and asking difficult questions. The secret sauce in all this was Jana Winter contacting every company that she could think of that had anything to do with donating to Wikipedia or supporting Wikipedia.

How do you think a few of us discovered the "Spanking Art" Wikia site on a Monday, yet had it dismantled before the weekend? It was the threat of an advertiser boycott, sealed up in a PowerPoint presentation with actual images, not "links".

Regular people don't follow a sea of links.

Now, I'm not undermining Dr. Sanger here, but I think what would work much more effectively would be...

Design an 8.5 x 11 color collage of images (the popular ones) on Wikipedia and Commons, then another 8.5 x 11 page itemizing all of the poor governance decisions made by the Wikimedia Foundation over the past few years. Add a spot for a citizen to sign the bottom of the second page, with a request that the recipient of said printed page "do whatever you can to persuade the Wikimedia Foundation to improve its governance system, so that we are not subjected to their unaccountable output any more". Put it in PDF form, post it online, then invite Average Joes to print it out and mail it to their local school superintendent, congressperson, senators, nearest FBI office, pastor, etc. You need a network of at least 10 people (with Facebook and Twitter followings) pointing others to this PDF, so it doesn't come off as the work of one nutcase.

Fair enough. I know this round is probably not entirely played out, but I notice that the public is now largely silent about it, and Foundation-L's discussion looks dead.

In other news, Zack Exley is WMF "Chief Community Officer": http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Zack_Exley

Make it so!

Jon

You are 100% wrong. This is the equivalent of tipping your hand in a card game. Many of the Wikipedia bigwigs regularly read this site and react violently upon learning about some sort of shenanigans or insulting remarks. If they know you are coming and what you are up to, they'll be ready to respond.



Life is not a Kevin Costner movie. PR campaigns (grassroots or otherwise) require a lot of time, planning and energy. I am sorry to say that this seems like a lot of talk -- very entertaining talk, of course, but eventually talk has to be replaced with action or nothing gets done.

Greg nailed it -- if you want to hit WMF where it matters, aim for the wallet. And in today's economy, no one wants to waste money -- especially on dubious charities.

Depends on the links. If they see a sea of salacious-sounding links, they'll follow a few links, then see the quantity and nature of the rest of the links. It is precisely the quantity and "quality" of porn that most people are ignorant of.


This is a great idea too. I don't think it would be more effective, though, but that's all just speculation. I do think that it's a poor idea to suggest that the exercise is to "persuade the Wikimedia Foundation to improve its governance system," which is very vague. If you want a bottom-line message, pick something clear and realistic, like, "persuade the Wikimedia Foundation to label adult content as such, or work closely with another organization in its efforts to do so."

This can lead to further questions, such as "Why hasn't this already been done as a matter of course?"

Possibly the most effective recipients of such images would be state departments of education, because they have a lot of clout when it comes to filtering in school districts.

Gee--100% wrong! That's wronger than I usually am!

No, you haven't thought this through; I have. Notice that none of the advance warning given to the WMF and WP community (as when I posted my letter to the FBI) made the slightest bit of difference. I operated absolutely out in the open, and it was actually Jana Winters' warning to the WMF (if I properly understand how it all went down) that resulted in some action (especially Jimmy Wales') on their part.

"They'll be ready to respond"--as if! How are they going to respond? What can they possibly say? If they say, as they did before, that they aren't a platform for porn, then everyone instantly thinks, "Um, no, you have all that stuff linked on that page I just saw, and you officially support porn by policy." If they say, "We're being unfairly attacked by a coordinated group of trolls," everyone will laugh and demand, "Seriously, what is up with all the porn and pro-porn and anti-child policy on the site that is documented on that page?" If they remove all of the images we link to (which is what I guess you want to say), we collect the images in secret, long enough to make webcite copies anyway. Besides, of course they won't do that. They can't, because Jimmy Wales already tried that, and they have decided to support their porn and child-unfriendly policies openly and publicly. So if Jimmy Wales, or anyone at the Foundation, says, "We must delete all of this evidence," it becomes even more politically dangerous (i.e., regarding Wikipedia's internal politics) for them to do so.

Anyway, I'll tell you exactly what they'll do. They'll do nothing. They'll pretend that nothing is going on. And if some reporter has the gall to ask them about the contents of this page, they'll say, "This is old news, and we are looking into what we can do as a community." That's all. Of course, they have given the public little evidence that they are looking into what they can do about it as a community, but no matter. The reporter will either (1) dutifully report this, with some note of skepticism, or (2) be Jana Winters and try make a big deal about it, but it won't gain any more traction than the last three FoxNews.com stories did.

So basically, you can create a big ol' page-o-wikiporn resting assured that (1) most of your links will go unbroken, because Wikipedians daren't self-censor now in the face of renewed pressure from the likes of us, and (2) when the page is passed around for a period of several months, it's going to be the focus point of a gradually building firestorm of controversy. But the way to get there is to raise public awareness, get people thinking, get people talking about it.


It's not a PR campaign. It's simply a web page and a grassroots effort to get the URL of the page spread as far and wide as possible. Given the nature of the content on the page, and what it all means, they'll come, and they'll talk about it. Trust me.


Jana Winters already tried that, apparently without much effect (although, admittedly, that remains to be seen; let's see what happens this December). If that's true (as I think), why didn't she have much of an effect? Because the people at those foundations really don't care about Wikiporngate. Why don't they? Because it looks like it's something cooked up by Fox News, and it looks like prudish censorship; besides, they're not going to put themselves on the line by publicly dressing-down such a popular site as Wikipedia.

Most people, especially people in the corporate world, feel obligated to behave like sheep. They don't want to (or are expected by their organization not to) stand out of the crowd. They don't want to be the first (or the second, or the third) to declare that the emperor has no clothes. They have to feel that they're part of a larger movement, that it's not "dangerous" to speak out on a certain point.

I agree that going to people holding the purse strings is important too, and other movers and shakers (especially highly-placed people in the world of education and education technology) are important as well. But you make it much, much easier for these people to react if there is already a general public reaction to this stuff.

I trust you, but you are not correct.



The general public doesn't care. They only go to Wikipedia to look up something. They have no clue how the site operates, and I suspect 10 out of 10 people on the street don't even know who Jimbo is.

In fact, thanks to the general public, pornography is one of the most popular commodities on the Net.

When you move away from pornography and focus on child endangerment, you have a better argument. There was a discussion here sometime back that kicked off with the consideration that self-identified minor Julian Colton was responsible for handling pornographic material. Use that information as a jumping point and this effort will have traction.

Sure we need the big page of links if even just for activists to act from. Saves duplicating work.

Has anyone actually called Jana Winter up from 'Wikipedia Review' or 'The Larry Sanger Foundation for Wikipedia Reform' and asked her

for her contact list?
what the feedback was and who is 'in'?
why she and Fox do it, e.g. was it personal was it for some Foxy politics of their own?
if they would be willing to push the child protection agenda?
is there any responsible money t pay for some professional advocacy?

What ever you want to call it, for me the obvious place to start is working those contacts.

I also think that it is possible some public relations or political relationship company might take it on pro bono. Larry, you seem to have had bad experience or a poor opinion on such business but good ones do work.

As for the Wiki-Wankathon organizers seeing and reading such discussion ... yes & no. It is good to keep them guessing where things are coming from next. I could say more but I wont.

I agree that the Wikimedia Foundation have proven themselves to fail over any aspect of capable governance and the volunteers of this 501 have dug their heels in over their right to upload porn. The outspoken community leaders being ideologically in support of free, unlimited porn and no limitation on child access or child maintenance of it.

It seems to me that the Wikimedia Foundation are incapable of and unwilling to actually change anything. Their firm grip on their Section 230 as a shield at the front ('apparently' doing nothing so as not to be accuse of editing and moderating user created content) has left them wide open at the rear over these issues. It is going to remain a vulnerable issue for a long time. I guess they just think that no one is going to be motivated enough to sustain an opposition to them and that the issue will just go away of its own.


To alter public opinion takes time and persistence ... I do not say "We" but "The Cause" really does need someone to act as a part-time lobbyist. Such an advocate may as well come from the "Destroy All Wikipedia Front" because working the big funding foundations will have some effect on running of the site ... but I wonder how much? User donations were high this year but probably the peak of support.

Perhaps I would add to the list a "Manual for Dissidents" ... a Post-Wikipedian Anarchists' Cookbook ... along the lines of "Righteously pissed off at how you have been objectively shat on at the Wikipedia? Well, here is how to screw them back professionally and efficiently. Don't waste your time and energy trashing and trolling, learn new skills, meet cool people and have more interesting experiences than being an unpaid serf on Massa Jimbo's Farm."

All right, who's the wise guy?

Sumbuddy from the “Show Me” State, apparently.

Jon