I thought I'd get the ball rolling.

1. Only a tiny fraction of all the porn on Wikimedia Commons has actually been removed. (Some prime examples of stuff that remains should be offered.)

2. Wikipedia itself has a tremendous amount of porn. (Some of the primest examples of this should be offered.)

3. The porn-purge has mostly stopped. (It has, hasn't it? I'm not totally sure of this; I looked at the deletion log on Commons earlier today and couldn't find much.) A fair bit of the porn that was deleted has been restored. (Would be good to include links to the most egregious examples of restored porn.)

4. Though he may pretend to, recent events have only underscored the fact that Jimmy Wales does not really possess the authority to get rid of the porn. The porn-purge has stopped, and has been reversed, and Wales was shouted down and in effect de-sysoped by the community.

5. The Wikimedia Foundation disclaims the authority to get rid of the porn; they specifically say they cannot order the community around.

6. Because of 4 and 5, it is deeply misleading to say, as some have, that Wikipedia is purging the porn. Jimmy Wales has expressed an opinion and made some efforts, and the WMF has gone on the record supporting him, but the effect of these actions has been almost negligible.

7. (This really needs to be reported.) The political culture of Wikipedia is deeply hostile to getting rid of porn. For instance, there is a pornography policy page that is decidedly in favor of it.

8. No open discussion of porn on Wikipedia & Commons has begun. The outcome of such a discussion will be pretty obvious: there is a huge number of Wikipedians adamantly and petulantly opposed to all manner of "censorship."

9. Because of 6-8, the porn on Wikipedia and Commons is here to stay, unless either the force of law or sustained and deep public criticism is applied to Wikipedia.

10. The most interesting things Jimmy Wales has said behind the scenes to his own peeps (e.g., about his motives).

I'd like to pass this around to my contacts when it is finished. Can you help fill out the list and track down evidence for the points?

I would suggest that he has the authority but not the will. If I was him, I would have started desysopping the people who began to wheel war. There were 12 or so admin. Any admin who refused to accept it and acted out should also be removed, and anyone disrupting over it would be blocked. A strong crack down would have been the only way to handle it. He has the ability to take back the site and remove anyone who tries to get in his way. However, he cowers to a few mostly anonymous users who have no real connection or true authority on the site. Most of them contribute nothing, so the loss of them is only a gain in efficiency.

11. The politics of the cult (I cannot use the word organization) make it such that "discussion" is meaningless and pointless, 'talking out' is the nature of the game, opposing the zealots will bring upon any dissenters lifelong adversity from them and their cabal ... it is an environment full of intimidation, persecution and bias, editors invest a tremendous amount of effort researching and composing merely to destroy their opposition etc. This is the underlying untold story.

12. Wikipedia is a cult. It can really only be understood from within the cult model ... an aggressive meme consuming the energy of its target hosts, aiming at enculting young people, under the surface, spreading a libertine, irresponsible, unaccountable "Free Culture" and using children as adminstrators.

Larry, you need a publicist working for you. You need to do it now whilst the story is hot.

You may not need to pay for this.

If you want, you may even get paid for it ... and I know that you want to donate any rewards to your chosen charities. Excellent. Tell them.

This is the guy you should speak to in the UK. He would probably take you on a Pro Bono basis as you are fighting porn and child related issues. It will feed out to the world.

It is even better as Wales is getting into bed with the Freuds and Murdochs of the world. Max Clifford would love that dynamic. He is Left-leaning, lower class and loves the rough and tumble. Make sure you tell him that (Jimmy Wales and Kate Garvey going to recent London Wikipedia meetings. She is Tony Blair's former advisor and Freud Communications director. He will know her).

Despite feeding the tabloids, he does do objective good work as well. He would probably be able to find you a USA counter part.

You need your story to be heard now ... London media feed the world. It is no time for false modesty.

MAX CLIFFORD ASSOCIATES Moss House 15-16 Brooks Mews Mayfair London W1K 4DS. Tel 0207 408 2350. www.maxclifford.com

email max@maxclifford.com

Got a story? story@maxclifford.com

If you chose not to follow up ... then let us know.

This quote will make you smile ... from post here.

Without any doubt, this could get it onto TV and into public dialogues ...

Is it a big enough story or a serious enough issue?

Yes, I genuinely think so and you are the only alternative expert ...

Well... I hate to seem pessimistic, but unless it's child porn, it's going to be extremely difficult to get MSM outlets that aren't seriously right-wing to pick up the story based on salacious-scandal potential alone. Having such a story restricted to the right-wing media isn't bad, but it does tend to put some of us into a "strange bedfellows" situation.

We all have to be realistic about this - people like internet porn, and some people really, really, really like internet porn. Just asking the question, "what is this doing in a so-called encyclopedia" has never been MSM fodder in the past. The issue of "why are minors being put in the position of having to administer this material" is only slightly more viable, and even then you need a face to put to it, and that means cooperation from at least one underage WP admin - not likely to happen without some sort of deprogramming intervention, meaning you'd have to involve the parents.

Another part of it is that most people, especially in the media, are perfectly aware that Wikipedia isn't really an encyclopedia in a scholarly sense (or in almost any sense, for that matter). Journalists aren't long-term thinkers - they can't afford to be - and Wikipedia is a long-term problem, not an immediate one for most people.

So... We'll want to figure out how many of the deleted/unrestored images might qualify as child porn. If most of that stuff is gone good and proper, then we're back to documenting the usual hypocrisy and hoping someone picks up on it for an in-depth story somewhere...

Erik Moeller will remain an embarrassment to the WMF in regards to this, but my guess is they'll eventually try and find him a "brass parachute" to get him quietly cashiered. I'm not sure who would hire him now that his earlier statements on sex between children have been so heavily exposed, but they might yet find someone... maybe back in Germany. Someone has to owe Sue Gardner or Mike Godwin a favor or two.

Again, sorry I can't be more optimistic. I don't exactly hate internet porn myself, to be honest - and I'm afraid my ability to see the issue of Wikipedia hosting it as fundamentally different (and worse) than, say, superhugeboobs.com hosting it, is atypical. I just don't think media people really make, or even understand, the distinction. (If there even is one!)

... "That Wikipedia has placed responsibility on policing the porn on brainwashed child administrators."

All fair enough but ... with the right publicists - and a quiet day/week in the press ... it might be possible to land a few stories. These publicists can pull weight if there is an issue. They can pick up the phone and get straight through to the editors. They are co-creators in the news.

This is the mentality we are talking about ... (censored for good taste)

The one single issue that's not being mentioned here is the most important:

The people who are asked, as volunteer editors, to administer this content are in many cases children and adolescents themselves. (See this thread for one example of a 15-year-old who is an administrator on ten different Wikis for WMF and who has been asked to delete or review hardcore and fetish porn).

Nobody asks these kids their age. Nobody asks their parents if they're okay with all of this.

Nobody knows if the other people editing are pro-pedo POV pushers or paid shills for the porn industry. And the "Community" basically says that "Pedophiles can be productive editors".

No parental control. Complete anonymity for everyone, including pro-pedo POV pushers and Pro-zoophilia POV pushers.

Should this be allowed on a serious encyclopedia? This is how this article looked for months, before we brought this to the attention of WP here. When this material, concerning the sexual abuse of an eleven-year-old boy, was removed, this discussion took place. That material has been partially restored . While false statements about the Dutch royal family were taken out of the article, the references to child sexual abuse remain in the article to this day.

And that's just fine with the WMF.

No. Even most people who may like Internet porn would have concerns about unrestricted access to it on an educational website mostly aimed at school-age children. This is the whole and entire point. I get v irritated by those people on commons who say 'it's not like they can't get it elsewhere on the internet'. Maybe they can but they would have to look for it and (most of all) they probably wouldn't be able to see it because of the filters, such as I use at home.

And I get VERY angry with people who say it's the parent's job to protect children. Sure. I protect them by putting filters on, on the assumption that websites are responsibile enough to identify themselves as child-friendly. Wikipedia isn't doing this (end of rant).

A difficult, and therefore under-reported issue, is that the main power brokers within Wikipedia are self-appointed characters, often with serious issues with the general consensus of the world - David Gerrard, he of two wives, a dubious taste in string vests, spokesperson for Wikipedia, who "danced on the skulls" of a serious organisation who had a problem with child porn (though who fought the wrong battle).

From Foundation-L DG writes:



To which the sycophants respond:





AKA "I see no ships." but in a bad way.

The main issue seems to be that they cannot discriminate between content management and censorship. They are totally inconsistent: they have a concept of NPOV, where they supposedly understand that biased presentation can mislead, yet when it comes to freakshow pictures, they are quite happy to let Commons content be run by people with exceptionally extreme POVs.

One wonders if Gerard Minor is educated in the ways of sexual deviancy from an early age to ensure a proper education and world view? I wonder how many bottles that poor kid has been made to sit on? Has it had its first genital piercing yet?

On pedophile activism on Wikipedia, there is no better place to go than the excellent page on Wikisposure. http://www.wikisposure.com/Wikipedia_Campaign.

I was blocked for pointing out on Wales' talk page that the artist of the famous Wikipitan image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipe-tan has a Japanese website devoted to child-porn images (some very unpleasant - babies having salt sprayed on their vaginas and screaming). It was he who drew this controversial image

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lolicon_Sample.png

He says here that he draws pornographic comic strips

http://kasuga39.deviantart.com/journal/12617458/#comments

(where I note our old friend Tyciol http://www.wikisposure.com/Tyciol, self-confessed girl-lover, banned from Wikipedia but still at large on all the other Wiki projects, has just commented there). Kasuga's website is here

http://www.geocities.jp/kasuga399/

where you can find many images of underage girls drawn in a sexualized way.

[edit] And one of the sites he links to on this page http://www.geocities.jp/kasuga399/bookmark.html#policy is very disturbing.

http://satsuki-yamai.net/top DOT html (do not link from work)
http://satsuki-yamai.net/status_doku/index DOT html (probably illegal)

Cartoons of little girls being tortured. Why is he linking to this? Why is the artist behind the famous Wikipedia 'Wikipe-tan' linking to websites showing little girls with their genitalia being mutilated, screaming in pain? Beyond belief.

See also here http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...icon_Sample.png for the usual idiotic discussion about whether the lolicon image was illegal or not.

Another site he links to portrays graphic sexual abuse of minors

http://avonlea.sakura.ne.jp/dojin DOT htm (almost certainly illegal)

[edit] Tyicol's comment on Kasuga's page is very revealing:

Of course, another story mentioned on another thread was that Wikipedians deliberately stole copyright photos done by the British National Gallery and put them on Commons because the copyright rules in the States are different to the copyright rules in the UK - so that's morally fine then.

Essentially, they are vaguely mindful of US statutes, though only when it has to be pointed out to them, but that is not through any sense of moral responsibility, it is simply very grudging acceptance of statutes, but any other legal system is clearly wrong.

They thoughtlessly apply "Information must be free" with a strange concept that only good can come from anything.

Perhaps the over-arching group-think failure is that they are very dismissive of government yet fail to recognise that they themselves are enforcing dictatorial governance from within the anarchy - forcing their ideals onto a world that does not want them - the Wikipedian cabals are the very thing that they proclaim to despise.

14. Few to none of them are qualified (or even educated) to discuss matters of legality.

"Discussion" as a panacea is utterly misleading. At best, it half a dozen anonymous ID, some of which are going to be sockpuppets, at worst it is mob rule shouting down and back stabbing.

Godwin's brief ... as minimal as his involvement is ... is merely to defend the foundation, and advise on defence; not pursue any standards.

They call it "compliancy", that means they do not have to do anything pro-active merely cover their ass and "comply" when law enforcement or courts come and get them.

The same Tyciol is quoted in this SiliconRepublic article.


A brief note to the article author, and the quote is magically gone...

The same Tyciol who has been banned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tyciol (not without strong objections from many editors) permanently from en:Wikipedia, for his advocacy of child pornography elsewhere. Let me dig up the thread.

[edit] This post http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=215331 notes how someone was banned a while ago for complaining about Tyciol's activities. (It was common practice pre-2008 to ban not pedophiles but people who complained about pedophiles. I myself received such a ban. It has got somewhat better in that there are now private hotlines you can call to. But it still remains that, on planet Wiki, to accuse someone of pedophilia advocacy is far worse than advocating it).

[edit] Here is the best thread - summarises all the pedophile and bestiality advocacy in a neat set of links. http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...27636&hl=tyciol

User:Zetawoof is still editing of course - here is his infamous 'Zoo code' which categorises what kind of bestiality you are into. http://www.webcitation.org/5e3bpSAqB

Add into the mix this thread, which documents discussion about whether a six-year-old should be allowed to edit...



OMG! It's the end of the World as we know it!

Haiduc (T-C-L-K-R-D) spent almost six years exclusively adding pro-pedophilia POV (redefined as "pederasty") into WP articles, including articles about J. S. Bach and Buddhism. He was only banned (by the ARBCOM, not the "Community") after he was repeatedly discussed here. This statement is particularly telling...as is this statement from a deleted article about "historical pederastic couples" (only viewable by WP admins) :



This WikiVoices Podcast from December 2009 discusses "minors and Wikipedia" and is a good way of documenting attitudes of the Wikipedia Community about "child protection". A transcript is here.



The question that they don't ask is "what happens when somebody who's 12 starts editing and then doesn't say "Hi, I'm 12? How do they protect this unidentified minor against....whatever?"

What motivated Jimbo in the first place was the fact that Fox was talking to the big ticket donors to see if they knew about the porn. If Fox follows up with the big ticket donors to see if any of them remain concerned, it's possible that some of them will withdraw their support or spell out their criteria for future support. To my mind, the big money (and little else) will determine the outcome of this issue. Frankly, I'd rather see those tax-deductible donations go to something better than WMF. Cleaning up the porn on WP is simply not in the cards.


That would turn the story from a porn purge to a people purge. And while a people purge would never make it to the mainstream press, it would turn WP into a civil war battlefield fought by hundreds of pseudonymous combatants wearing furry costumes. In other words, it would amp up the MMPORG features of the game, while attenuating the attention on the overarching educational mission of WMF.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that these supposed advocates of 'free speech' don't belong to that category at all. I'm actually passionate about freedom of expression, which is why I get so angry about banning and blocking of talk pages and so on.

What we really have is a loose coalition of NAMBLA activists, internet bestialists, paid promoters of the porn industry, cranks and junk scientists of all stripes (including the Connolley variety also) all of whom are united in a common interest. Every piece of scum and vermin that you could imagine crawling out of the woodwork and onto the internet: there you have the 'community'.

What's the deal with the width of this thread? Could C↑/C or some Mod please put {imgx} tags around the wide load images?

Thanks,

Jon

That's not just on Commons. Did people know there's a site called Wikilivres that is hosted in Canada and claims not to be a WMF site? The only reason for its existence is that there's lots of stuff that's out of copyright under Canadian law while still copyright elsewhere. As the site's in Canada, it can legally carry the stuff.

Which means Juliancolton's father.



I have a "hunch" that Hunch.com may be hiring. Or, if that doesn't pan out, there's always CiviliNation.org.

There are three types of works placed on Wikilivres:
1. Works that are PD in the country of origin, and elsewhere in the world, but not PD in the US because of the Mickey Mouse Act.
2. Works which are PD in the country of origin and Canada, because the copyright in the country of origin is equal or less than Canadian copyright. (e.g. Canada & India, and many other commonwealth countries; iirc, many Australian works are PD in Australia before they are PD in Europe or the US, but they are PD in Canada)
3. Works which are not PD in the country of origin, but are PD in Canada because the copyright duration there is the lower than the country of origin.
I don't know how many of each type is on Wikilivres; it is worth looking into, as I hope any of the items of the third type are important and are not hurting any author or their estate. I've never looked into the legality of the third type, but I would support this use of Canadian laws for any orphaned work.

Seeing the New Statesman describe the content thus:


it occurs that the press do not realise that a lot of this content is home made - well of course Commons wouldn't have commercial nonsense polluting its servers - how disgusting.

They'll be marching on the White House soon:

What do we want? - Free Willy!
When do we want it? - Now!

* Pornography is psychologically damaging to children.

* Most parents attempt to protect their children from pornography

* Wikipedia is designed, managed, and marketed in a way that defeats most parents' attempts to protect their children

* Example: Wikipedia could be on a "whitelist", or list of acceptable sites in a school library, bypassing the usual protections.

* This is not your garden-variety porn. It's not a stack of old Playboys with tasteful nudes or whatever. It's more explicit than Hustler, and borders on illegal in many cases. Exposure to it may have emotional and developmental consequences on children.

* The "educational value" test that is being proposed has no basis in reality. It's a mob of anonymous contributors who decide whether the images are educational or not. This group labels just about everything as "educational".

That says it all. Here also a link to a site explaining the damaging effects of pornography on children (and adults).

http://www.protectkids.com/effects/harms.htm

[edit] Here's another, from 'Net Nanny' (which, however, does not include Wikipedia in its list of badsites).

http://www.netnanny.com/learn_center/article/144

All--thanks a lot for your excellent suggestions and the links somebody sent me--I will post a revised version here soon.

Publicist? I am already battling the mistaken impression that I am doing this to benefit Citizendium (can somebody explain to me how my getting in the muck with Wikipedia benefits Citizendium, because I can't see it), or for personal gain (in what way, and how am I gaining when being roundly attacked?). Getting myself a publicist would really make it look like I'm trying to wage a campaign. I merely want to do what I, as an individual, can do to help expose a situation that very stubbornly refuses to get exposed.

Not necessarily home made, but switched over under copyright games by licensing that the original website didn't have the right to make as they never got all of the license permissions to begin with.

Getting back on topic. You asked for evidence of this. Practically any of the on-wiki fora, or petition pages or Jimbo talk page places, really. Of which this one was typical. Wherever you see 'think of the children' used in a mocking and ironic way, there you will find some child-hating 20-something internet libertarian.



I thought Wales handled that to his credit.

Further evidence of the community's view is immediately evident in these two articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

The first assumes that 'moral panic' really is moral panic. The second, that invoking the importance of children is necessarily a logical fallacy.

I notice a user called 'think of the children' did try and address the problems with the second article, but was reverted, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=335455884, and then banned.

[edit] And just appeared on the same page, there is this:



The one called 'Rosenzweig' really is stupid. And arrogant.

Commons has now started a list of genitalia for review.

So if anyone here wants to "review" some genitalia, you know where to go.

"No honey, I'm not surfing porn sites, just reviewing genitalia!"

I see that they've deleted the "17-year-old penis" already (leaving the 18-year-old penis, of course!--although it's quite unclear exactly how they know that one is actually 17 and the other is actually 18...), but they've left this charming NSFW picture, which has a "before and after" aspect which add much educational value!

Here's another draft. Just what I could do in a short amount of time. I'm busy with a huge number of things. I'd deeply appreciate people supplying more links/evidence where I don't have it yet.

1. It is not widely understood or reported that the sort of pornography on Wikipedia is truly extreme. To believe some people, you'd think it was a bunch of artistic nudes and textbook-type illustrations. This is emphatically not the case. Here are some examples [omitted for now, but I have a list--I'd appreciate more input privately].

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...alia_for_review (storing this list here just for convenience's sake)

2. Only a tiny fraction of all the porn on Wikimedia Commons has actually been removed; the total collection of pornographic images probably numbers in the many thousands, while the number of images that have been removed recently has been on the order of hundreds at most. To convince yourself of this, probably the only reliable method is to do some searching yourself. Here are some terms to search for (warning, EXTREMELY EXPLICIT photographs and drawings): vulva (very long page), penis and category:penis (note the plentiful subcategories), category:oral sex and subcategories, category:BDSM and huge number of subcategories, category:paraphilia subcategories, sex positions and category:sex positions, category:anal sex and subcategories, etc.; see also "category:nude children". That should get you started.

3. Wikipedia itself has a tremendous amount of porn and other extremely sexually explicit material. If you go to some of the more obvious destinations, like "[url=]sexual intercourse[/url]" or "sexual fetishism" you won't find anything that is too terribly shocking, but you begin to get a taste of what's there. What there is, is every possible sex position, elements of sex acts, body part, fetish, combination and types of partners, pornography and the industry, etc., often explicitly illustrated. Some articles have extremely explicit photographs or illustrations that are as explicit as, and sometimes beyond, anything you would see in Playboy, Penthouse, or Hustler. Examples to search for would include: anal beads; fisting; male ejaculation; cum shot; vulva [need to expand this list!]. These may not all deserve the name "pornography" (but, for example, it is beyond me how anyone can deny that a realistic drawing of a "cum shot" is pornography) but they are certainly extremely explicit in any case.

4. The Wikimedia Commons porn-purge has mostly stopped; see the deletion log. A fair bit of the images that Jimmy Wales himself deleted have been restored: [need link--where is that part-red, part-blue list?]

4. Though he may pretend to, recent events have only underscored the fact that Jimmy Wales does not really possess the authority to get rid of the porn. The porn-purge has stopped, and has been reversed, and Wales was shouted down and in effect de-sysoped by the community.

5. The Wikimedia Foundation disclaims the authority to get rid of the porn; they specifically say they cannot order the community around.

6. Because of 4 and 5, it is deeply misleading to say, as some have, that Wikipedia is purging the porn. Jimmy Wales has expressed an opinion and made some efforts, and the WMF has gone on the record supporting him, but the effect of these actions has been almost negligible.

7. (This really needs to be reported.) The political culture of Wikipedia is deeply hostile to getting rid of porn. For instance, there is a pornography policy page that is decidedly in favor of it.

8. No open discussion of porn on Wikipedia & Commons has begun. The outcome of such a discussion will be pretty obvious: there is a huge number of Wikipedians adamantly and petulantly opposed to all manner of "censorship," and many strongly resist even simply labelling explicit content as such. See ttp://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/date.html (more specific citations here and from other on-wiki sources needed) For just a sample of the attitude toward pornography on Wikipedia and Commons, see: http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t..._have_responded

9. Because of 6-8, the porn on Wikipedia and Commons is here to stay, unless either the force of law or sustained and deep public criticism is applied to Wikipedia.

10. The most interesting things Jimmy Wales has said behind the scenes to his own peeps (e.g., about his motives). See http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/195376

11. Minors are permitted and in some cases even encouraged to administer all such material. Administrators have the right to see deleted images (before they are permanently deleted). http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=27358&st=0

12. Wikipedia and WMF projects do not label its explicit content as such. They also do not put it behind warning messages, as many porn websites do.

13. There is excellent evidence that there has been a concerted effort by pedophiles to alter Wikipedia articles on pedophilia-related topics. See: http://www.wikisposure.com/Wikipedia_Campaign and http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=28434 and http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=28686&st=0 User:Tyciol was banned http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tyciol (not without strong objections from many editors) permanently from en:Wikipedia, for his advocacy of child pornography elsewhere. This post http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=215331 notes how someone was banned a while ago for complaining about Tyciol's activities. (It was common practice pre-2008 to ban not pedophiles but people who complained about pedophiles. It has got somewhat better in that there are now private hotlines you can call to. But it still remains that, on planet Wiki, to accuse someone of pedophilia advocacy is far worse than advocating it). The following thread summarises pedophile (and bestiality) advocacy in a neat set of links: http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showt...27636&hl=tyciol

14. I reported the Wikimedia Commons Category:Pedophilia to the FBI. It features explicit drawings of children being sexually molested. These have still not been removed, after a month.

15. Just as an example of the mentality that holds sway on Wikipedia, consider this. Should this be allowed on a serious encyclopedia? This is how this article looked for months, before we brought this to the attention of WP here. When this material, concerning the sexual abuse of an eleven-year-old boy, was removed, this discussion took place. That material has been partially restored . While false statements about the Dutch royal family were taken out of the article, the references to child sexual abuse remain in the article to this day.

16. While it is of course true that parents are responsible for managing their children, they cannot help but rely on certain trusted sources. Wikipedia has portrayed itself, and has widely been portrayed by others, as such a source. Many parents regard its most serious defect as being amateurish content. What has rarely been discussed, until recently, has been the amount of pornography available on this educational site. Wikipedia has not made any public statement to the effect that it is not safe for children to use (this is true, isn't it?)--which would certainly be the view of the vast majority of parents apprised of the above facts. In fact, Wikipedia is often portrayed as a "good place to start" by responsible educational organizations (see for example http://www.edutopia.org/using-wikipedia-classroom ) who are, evidently, not aware of the problems with Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself encourages its use even in K-12 education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools_and_u...rsities_project http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Initiatives/Schools_project -- need better citations here

17. In case this hadn't recently occurred to you, you should consider that pornography is psychologically damaging to children. See: http://www.protectkids.com/effects/harms.htm

18. On Wikipedia, the "educational value" test that has been proposed [link??] has no basis in reality. In practice, Wikipedians essentially form a mob of anonymous contributors who decide whether the images are educational or not. This group labels just about everything as "educational".

Larry, thanks for organising things thematically. The problem with a forum is that stuff easily gets lost. I have put some more material here in a way that will remain stable.

http://www.wikipediareview.com/Directory:The_Wik...-May_porn_purge

I still can't find the link that shows wales' deletion log. Can anyone help out?

Are there any more links I could have? For those with access to Greg's site, please note that talk page access to the page above is unrestricted. The page itself is accessible only to me.

[edit] Don't worry - I found the deletion log, which is now on the page above.

It's here.

This is based on the statement from Michael Snow, speaking for the Board of Trustees.
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikim...May/000008.html



I think Jimmy also said somewhere that they should get rid of redundant offensive images on the grounds that they only need one or two illustrations to be educational. I'm too lazy to find that link.

Another point really needs to be hammered home that this isn't just a bunch of Wiki admins who love their porn. Its a Board of Trustees, real people with real names and the ability to sign the checks, who are enabling them. I'd like to see a reporter interview this Michael Snow character.

Jimbo clicked the delete button 77 times on May 7th, so you need to "view 100" on that deletion log page to see them all. What I did was to view the HTML source and copy/paste out the 77 entries for May 7th. Of those 77 entries, 43 still had "redlink" in the url as of this morning. The other 34 entries were not redlinked, meaning they had been restored. There was a bit of wheel warring, so those 77 deletions correspond to only 71 unique images that Jimbo deleted or redeleted on May 7th.

While this latest scandal may get more MSM coverage than normal, it's not really causing much outrage among the public, mainly because this comes across as more comical fodder to the public than some serious outrage, looking at most of the comments to the reported stories.

This is something that Colbert and the other late night comedians can get a lot of mileage out of and would help expose how much of a laughing stock WP is, not necessarily because of the porn, but because of how dysfunctional the "community" is in handling this.

They should speedy delete any of them and ban uploaders if they uploaded more than 10 or so of those deleted.

There are several major differences between this and previous scandals. Maybe most important among them is the fact that Wikipedia & Commons do, in fact, host a lot of extremely explicit images. Sad to say (since it's been true for years now) but this is actually news to a lot of people.

Anyway, folks, I am not going to be able to devote much more time to all this in the coming couple of weeks. It's crunch time for several projects I'm working on. If you help me out by filling in the blanks & supplying more links in the above, I'll post it at larrysanger.org (crediting WR for your help) and pass it along to journalists.

The "public" is defined as the set of people who comment on reported stories. I see.

That was an interesting one, from my view, because something similar had happened a while earlier that was handled much differently. Lar might remember the name of the museum better than I, but apparently someone had downloaded some "very high quality" versions of some Japanese art from a museum's website, while the museum had only intended to have lower-res versions up (they were selling prints of the high res ones). The museum reached someone in the foundation, someone in the foundation passed it on to a certain group, and I ended up volunteering to do the deletions and take the heat.

Wasn't all that much heat, and the museum sent us a zip file with all the lower res images to use in their place. Worked out for everyone, but I think the resistance to something like that would be too strong now. Commons was more "mellow" then, but probably will be far less so now that the wagons have been circled against Jimbo: I suspect any compromise with the "non-commonist world" will be resisted on principle from now on.

I could be oversimplifying the "public" but these comments can give you a reflection of how those who are uninvolved or perhaps casually involved are reacting to this story. I have a feeling if I talked about this with my work buddies there would be the same general reaction that I'm seeing in those comments.

Does anyone have anything to report from the National Portrait Gallery/Dcoetze incident? Seems like some resolution or further action should have occurred by now.

I think your statement needs a cultural paragraph ...

Smut resides on commons because someone believes it has educational value, such as images of women urinating into a cup and drinking it, or that of a man stretching his testicles with a strap and dumbbell. The power base at commons actually believes these are important images with educational value and within the scope of the project. Aside from juvenile vandals uploading porn for fun - a large problem in and of itself - the porn collection at Commons is due to incredible poor judgment which is outside the realm an encyclopedia, and probably outside the realm of mental health. Wikipedia is supposed to have a neutral point of view but this sorry episode betrays a rabid activism, demonstrated not only by the images but by the vilification, banning and censorship of people who disagree with them.

* This is a cheap shot, but a thorough news story would include that Mr. Wales, the leader of Wikipedia, spent the early part of his career founding Bomis, a search portal oriented around adult content, and that Bomis money was used to get Wikipedia off the ground.

It seems to me to be worth a passing reference, based on the irony if nothing else.

People can mature with age. However, I expect many responses from this crowd will say that Jimbo can't or hasn't.

It's not a cheap shot, it's simply a statement of fact.

As recently as January 2008, the for-profit company that Jimbo chairs (Wikia, Inc.) hosted online a web menagerie of freely-licensed images (mostly photos) of innocent children juxtaposed with depraved images (mostly drawings) of children being mercilessly spanked until purple, along with images (almost exclusively photos) of various sexual-enhancement toys like dildos and butt-plugs. I helped lead an urgent campaign that challenged this "Spanking Art" Wikia wiki. Wales became quite ruffled under the collar, irritated that I had not "made a complaint through the proper channels". Imagine, sexually-charged images of deviant abuse against children, and the man hosting it on his company's servers was more upset that the complaints against his site weren't filed properly. Only after they caught wind that I was about to circulate a PowerPoint presentation to various family-friendly groups that would have devastated their advertisers, did they act quickly to dismantle the site.

He can and he has, but the poor guy finds himself in a crowd of teenagers who are dedicated to the pursuit of mutual pandering and who are above all mistrustful of "adults" and "old media". He should have gotten out of this a long time ago, but due to his "special place in teh community" probably didn't see this coming.

I don't think the Bomis stuff has much of anything to do with his intentions for Wikimedia and Wikia, but maybe that history has made it hard for him to criticize porn people (or it just didn't strike him as problematic).




Again, given his history he might (a.) not see a big problem with it, (b.) not feel he's the right guy to point out the problem with it, or (c.) be too busy talking to enthusiastic and intelligent teenagers to notice "#real_life" issues.

Good job, Dr. Sanger. However, in no.15 there is an incorrect link. In the part about the discussion that took place after the plot summary was deleted, the link under "this discussion took place" should be http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Hogg_(no...of_plot_summary

Perhaps I got that one wrong above

The current version of the article and and diffs should probably be webcited as well, to make sure that they don't zap all of that....