Why is Wikipedia still doling out porn?

Fox News
29 Jun 2007 • Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, answers a question during an interview in St. Petersburg, FL. • FoxNews.com investigation into allegations of child pornography online …

Home Roost Chickens.

I find this interesting...

On my blog/spam/news site, Examiner, I once made the comment:


And from this Fox News article now, it says:



I guess Examiner is influencing the mainstream media?

Fox News isn't exactly known for researching off more than Youtube

( foxnewslies.net )

+ outfoxed.org

+ google.com/search?q=site:mediamatters.org fox news lies fact check

I can't find the damn post but the word wasn't spam site, we said you were spamming it, when you were using misleading comments like "I found this great article" or "this author is realy insightful" when linking to your own blog

Yes, a vague similarity I grant you.

But now we can add Examiner to their list of quality sources too.

Burn

Face fucking palm.

Well done, Fox. I guess this came from Larry?

And there I thought the board had decided that there was not going to be any content labeling or categorisation.

Selection and implementation of an image filter was due to begin in January. It was due to be discussed at a Foundation Board meeting a couple of weeks back, but in the end, Jimbo said, the Board didn't get round to it.

Let's hope it does.

They should have asked which nation or culture revels in images of spitting semen into somebody's mouth.

I wonder how long it will take for the board to realize that they're essentially serving as a foil for Jimmy. As long as they're stupid enough to play the scapegoat, he can continue to claim that he's trying (very, very, very hard) to make things better, but that darn do-nothing board is to blame for everything.

How much does he get paid for speaking engagements these days? Fortunately his "special relationship" means that he doesn't have to give the WMF a cut (not that they need it).

I would have thought that it's just the weather for snowballing.

On the one hand, I can't manage any sympathy for the WMF in this matter.

On the other hand, using Murdoch and Roger Ailes as proxies in a culture battle is bound to have
unpleasant side effects. They are total slime, more interested in making money than in any
political or culture considerations. Even their right-wing political convictions are secondary to the basic
purpose of Fox News: to act as the New York Post or The Sun of cable TV. As long as the right-wing
ranting and idiocy brought in eyeballs, they were happy. Why else would they be running these
rants about porn on Wikipedia? Do they EVER offer serious analysis or discussion of Wikipedia's
other content? Of course not.

The lunatic right has been bitching them out for hiring more liberal and moderate commentators.
And look at the Conservapedia article about Fox. Funny as hell because it's totally insane, but it makes a valid point:
Murdoch is more interested in dollars than in "conservative purity".

You cannot trust them to make decisions that are favorable to society at large, any more than you
can trust Wales to do so.

That's not fair, really. The Murdochs employ lots of people at market rate, while Jimmy leeches off of people who work for free.

This analysis is on the money, as it were.

The sudden interest of Fox News in Larry Sanger's critique of pornographic content on Wikipedia seems to be almost engineered to egg-on the well-documented prurient obsessions of Fox-News types. The outraged consumer of Fox News content will point a browser to this investigative report solely on the basis of the word "pornography" in the headline. They'll tut-tut, dutifully scour Wikipedia for said pornography, rub out a quick one, and then loudly proclaim that the godless lib'rruls are corruptin' the chill'un with their interwebs.

Hm. I didn't see any mention of "godless lib'rruls" or any other conservative shibboleths in this particular article. Far be it from me to defend Fox News, but I thought the point of the article was to follow up the controversy of April/May 2010--to say that, in fact, if you had the impression that some sort of porn filter would quickly be installed on Wikipedia anytime soon, you would have been wrong.

It's too bad that only FoxNews.com takes an interest in this story, but that doesn't mean it is strictly a conservative story or that the story as they tell is wrong. In fact, the story is pretty much correct and on the mark in every respect, as far as I can tell. Do you have something to say about the story, as opposed to the source you found it in?

Anyway, enough meta-discussion. The comments by Jay Walsh are, predictably, ridiculous. Of course, he has an impossible job, if his job is to sound intelligent while defending this.

"Discussions have been under way for quite some time about how controversial content should be labeled or categorized." Oh, that's true, I'm sure. But the point is that there are lots of pictures of semen-covered faces, scores (hundreds?) of penises, objects inserted into all sorts of orifices, drawings of children being sexually molested, and various other things. These are some examples of the "controversial content" in question. And ultimately, the question is not whether such content should be called "pornography"--really, who cares? The question is whether such content should be treated in the same relatively mature way it is treated by a website like Flickr--or even websites that host explicit porn, but which have users confirm that they are over 18. Why on Earth should Wikip/media insist on being more explicit in how it presents its porn than an actual porn site?

"Wikipedia argues that parents and guardians should monitor at all times what kids can view online, and Walsh says guardians should be the ones to restrict access." This sounds responsive to the issue, but it really isn't. Even if a parent is looking over the child's shoulder, he should have the ability to determine whether a child should be shown the full monty. Wikip/media doesn't give him that ability. And besides, it's not only about children. Some adults don't want to be confronted with these images, and would strongly prefer to be able to exclude them from searches and so forth that they make, just as Google Image Search (not at all for prudes--when safe search is off!) does. No, the issue is whether Wikip/media gives its users the tools that they need to "restrict access" in the way they want.

"These articles contain referenced and documented information about a known topic. These topics may not be of interest or appealing to all people." What a ridiculous, even childish thing to say, even if we understand him to be talking about Wikipedia only and not Wikimedia Commons. That articles may not be of "interest" or "appealing to" people is obviously not the issue. The issue is whether Wikipedia is serving the public in a sensible way, that serves their expectations and interests. I would argue that clearly it isn't. But again, Walsh's job is impossible. There is no way that he can address that issue (whether the lack of a filter serves the interests of all users, but especially users with children) head-on and be anything but ridiculous or outrageous.

"But even those who produce pornographic content oppose having explicit images so easily accessible on Wikipedia. Q Boyer, a spokesperson for Pink Visual, a company that produces pornographic films, says Wikipedia should at least use a content filter similar to the SafeSearch function on Google.com." I want to see some serious journalist describe a half-dozen extremely explicit images on Wikipedia and Commons, then read the bit from Q Boyer to Jimmy Wales, and then ask, "It's been almost two years. Why hasn't Wikipedia adopted some common-sense filter of that sort, a filter that even a pornography company uses?" I would add: "Aren't you ashamed to be associated with an organization that drags its feet on such a thing even while recommending that the site be used by school children?"

"It would require developing a multinational, multilingual system that identifies whether an article is 'safe' -- but that is not possible when you reach across hundreds of nations and cultures. As a volunteer, non-profit project we're simply not resourced to do that," says Jay. Wrong. Utterly, completely wrong. It's just another data field. Yes, they've got a lot of images, but so does Flickr. And they've got a lot of people at work on the project, and the vast majority of images are fine and so can be quickly and easily labeled. If they were serious about it, they'd come up with tools that would allow users to label (categorize, or whatever) multiple pictures on a single page, using category and user markers as indicators of which pictures to review first. It's a big job, but it's totally possible. Hold contests to see who can label the most pictures. Invite people in from outside the website for this purpose (of course, Wikip/media would never do that, but they could). Do meta-review of image reviewers--if someone mislabels images enough, they lose the privilege of doing so. Etc., etc. And don't talk to me about the system being imperfect. All systems are imperfect, but a somewhat leaky filter is better than no filter. And also don't talk to me about there being impossible issues to resolve. Bullshit. Wikipedia makes decisions about all sorts of hard issues, and prides itself on doing so.

I note that the author of the piece was on Natka's Facebook page (which also hosted a link to Greg's Examiner column).

Well said. And I agree, this is a well-researched article.

The Wikimedian argument about there being no perfectly "neutral" way to categorise images (and that therefore it should not be attempted at all) simply does not stand up. Neutrality, as a Wikipedia pillar, is defined as following, first and foremost, the line of the most reputable mainstream sources. And whatever Wikim/pedia is doing here, it is not that.

That is correct. And I'd still like to know what Mr. Walsh continues to say these things.

The Fox story isn't bad, they sometimes produce decent copy. Their problem is their public reputation.
Go and watch The Daily Show for a week--they spend a remarkable amount of time mocking bits
of Fox News video, routinely. Supposedly Jon Stewart sits all day long, watching Fox for "material".
There's something a bit off when you have a comedian, watching a "news channel", to steal ideas
for jokes--at the channel's expense.

Other commentators derive whole careers from whatever incoherent twaddle comes out of O'Reilly's
or Hannity's or Steve Doocy's mouth. And they had Glenn Beck, the king of paranoid shit, for
TWO YEARS. During which he became their #1 program, for a brief time.

Fox's report is all well and fine. When you get the New York Times or the Washington Post to write
about this, then I'll really be impressed. So will a lot of other people.

Anyone following the Tim Messer-Kruse story? It's been going on for THREE YEARS, and recently
resulted in Messer-Kruse writing it up. It was a major embarrassment for the Magicpedia.
I haven't seen much "mainstream" coverage of it. In fact, not much coverage of it, period.
The media keeps giving Jimmy and Co. a free ride. Why?


That's the essence of it -- Wikimedia's approach is profoundly hypocritical and absurd. They love the free
content their volunteers generate, but they dare not piss off a substantial percentage of their crazed
fan-following by censoring and filtering anything. And you need Fox News, never a paragon of consistency
or journalistic integrity (like it or not, that's their reputation), to point it out. Not good, no matter
what your position on penis photos is -- or on Fox News.

Quite. The main reason they abandoned the idea of categorising and tagging media files was not that it would be an impossible amount of work – "not possible when you reach across hundreds of nations and cultures. As a volunteer, non-profit project we're simply not resourced to do that."

Everyone agrees that 95% of the really graphic material could be identified in a couple of afternoons, just using the existing category system.

The real reason was that the Germans said they would walk out if anyone did that.

When flickr introduced its filtering system the Germans were the most vocal in their opposition. Though that was mainly because flickr locked down German users so that they couldn't see any porn at all. The Yahoo! lawyers had decided that German law on the protection of Children made German employees vulnerable to such laws. The problem being that Germany requires an age-verification system for accessing pornographic content, and such a system on an international bases is not possible, or at least not something that Yahoo were prepared to implement. Thus they cut off access to all 18+ content to anyone that had a yahoo.de account. The row went on for over a year with a load of users threatening to walk. Yahoo stood firm, and hardly anyone did. A few went off to ipernity but then came back.
http://www.quora.com/Flickr/Why-does-Flick...rmany-and-India

Now the problem with Germany is that wikipedia have servers there, do they have any staff there too? If so they will come under German laws protecting children, and German law is pretty clear if you're content is aimed at German users (language will do) and it contains content that is foul of the child protection laws, then you either put in place technical measures to ensure that under 18s can't access it, or you DELETE the content in its entirety.

So if someone really wants to put the cat amongst the pigeons what they should do is interest the guys at the jugendschutz. Now I find the wikip[edia section on this rather amusing:



Because what the head of the jugendschutz was saying was:


IOW if you are notified and you don't have an age-verification system then you delete.

Amusingly though their filtering system would not be sufficient and they are likely to be in the same situation as the "Virgin Killer" issue, but with a legislation that is aimed at pornography.

On flickr the images have to be flagged to match the 'safe', 'moderate', and 'restricted' filtering. There is no exception. Even if you have the image private viewable only by yourself, it must be correctly flagged.

Posted links outside of flickr should not be directly to sites containing adult content, if it is to a commercial porn site then your account is toast. If it is to a none commercial site then the link should be to a visually safe area of the site. IOW flickr maintain that people following links should have the option to back out before having porn on their screens. They are conscious of someone say at a school reading a discussion forum clicking a link and then having a page of "Barely legal cum sluts" on their screen.

Flickr has a comment system and groups where discussions can take place. Groups can be restricted to 18+ members. As flickr does not have a filtering system for inlined imaged. It is an account terminating offence to inline link any pornographic image into any discussion or comment thread. That rule applies regardless of whether the group is 18+ or not. Again the reasoning is that someone may well be browsing a discussion forum during a lunch break, and not want to have to explain why they were looking at Sally Mann images at school.

Traditionally flickr went a little easy on that particular rule, given the nature of the group involved, and only really enforced it if someone was 'flashing'. However, recently the flickr abuse team has been laid off. Abuse reports are now handled by Yahoo directly. This is resulting in strict adherence to the non inline linking and violators are having their yahoo accounts including email deleted as well as their flickr account.

All of that is correct. There's just one thing – I am not aware that Wikimedia have servers in Germany. As far as I am aware, Commons and German Wikipedia are stored on servers in Florida.

German users have mentioned in the debate that public hot spots and public computers for Internet access are censored in Germany, to the extent that even some non-pornographic sites are inaccessible. So they have the experience of censorship.

They also have the experience of a very public controversy over a proposed child pornography law that the German government wanted to introduce; see "Family Minister vs. Freedom of Speech: Anti-Child Pornography Law Flounders":



In the end, the law was first signed into legislation and then disowned by the government that introduced it ("The Law that Nobody Wanted: New Internet Legislation Embarrasses German Government".

The free-speech activists won. To the German Wikipedians, the image filter proposal feels just the same, and they are hopeful that the ultimate outcome will be just the same.

Screw fox news. I LIKED uncensored internet when I was little, I'd probably be a lot less cool if I hadn't had unrestricted learning of the world. Reading (or seeing) "naughty" stuff never did me any harm, if people don't like it they can stop reading/looking... I visited chat rooms when I was about 11, but I was more mature than most. *Shrug* There always needs to be a failsafe that lets smart people bypass filters, cos if you are smart enough then you're proven capable of handling whatever you want I think really. I never had any real problems cos I was smart and never attached any personal info (until later when I was older and knew where was safe and where wasn't). There's just too many idiots on the internet now, lol.

Facebook ethics: No nipples; blood only - Leaked Facebook censorship policy from outsourcing company oDesk (T-H-L-K-D), RT.com, 16^th February 2012:

^ Welcome to the new sweatshops (T-H-L-K-D)... Literally, an army of hired anonymous minions.

That's because Jay himself is predictably ridiculous.


I know the answers to this, too. Pornographers think nothing of paying market price for the software to establish such a filter. It's nothing more than a business-to-business transaction, after all. To the Frei Kultur Kinder (a/k/a "freetards") that have the run of Wikipedia and over-awe the Wikimedia Foundation, that is more than merely the wrong approach, it is damnable heresy for which the offender that merely suggests it can expect a swift online auto de fey. Actually having to pay professionals for the software is deeply and exceeding offensive to their anti-corporate, "penises just want to be free" quasi-religion.

As for Jimbo, I sense no capacity for shame, but rather a capacity to sense danger to his revenue streams. Not the most highly developed capacity, as revealed by the Siegenthaler and Essjay scandals, but some capacity. His income as a public speaker and "web guru" is highly dependent on the public perception of WP. This is a big part of the reason why he is rarely seen to intervene in a content dispute until it is clear it is about to approach a Category 5 media shitstorm.

I do agree with you that the story in general is well-researched and on target, despite being a product of the perjurious wiretapping Murdochopoly. However, there is one major fact the story misses out: the fact that the WMF lacks the authority to do anything about the porn problem. Even here, many seem to have forgotten that a big part of the deal Jimbo made with teh communitah back in 2003 during the transfer of ownership from Bomis to the newly created WMF was that the WMF would primarily serve as a support organization for WP with no rights of management over content or site administration. The only small exception has been the "WP:OFFICE" policy, which essentially only covers claims of defamation and copyright infringement made by people with the means to hire lawyers to spend the WMF out of existence through costly litigation. These rights of management were already effectively in the hands of teh communitah due to Jimbo's largely hands-off management style (your terminology, I think), so the understanding was that would remain unchanged. The WMF has constantly reaffirmed this. It was simply another one of the compromises Jimbo had to make to keep teh communitah on site and toiling away for nothing, instead of deserting en masse as they likely would have done otherwise.

Does visiting chat rooms at such an early age lead to arrested development, do you think. *peers over top of glasses in old fart kind of way*

ha Well, my point is for me at least it did the exact opposite, it gave me a chance to learn fast >:] Protect the stupid and impressionable from themselves definitely, but blocking the kind of girl who read novels in primary school would've been just a crime, I dread to imagine if I had more neurotic parents seriously I'd probably be someone completely different (I remember when I caught my dad reading my emails I was very pissed off, I worked it out because when I opened Outlook the folder had changed ha, I still remember it.) - outside the cities, the UK is a pretty bland place to grow up til you can get to the cities

I don't like this Facebook "bright new future" of everything being monitored by anonymous minions behind monitors, who have no choice to work or starve, it's reducing humanity to just an industry... amazon mechanical turk indeed, ugh...
I think that is how the WMF could become if they gave into Fox News... And that would be far worse, I think I'd take openness over that even if I'd rather not see some stuff (and they definitely need to get a grip on pictures of the children ugh), it's like why I don't agree with a lot of things the US does, but however bad they get they are never as bad as a world ruled by the Party in China, or Iran would be like

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...kumizu_Girl.jpg

Commons is hosting bottomless lolicons.

Sounds like just your type of place, sleazebag.

And to think just a couple of weeks ago he was complaining about being called a fool.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=67609655:



http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=67610393:



Why are these people claiming to know that it's a "skin-colour bikini bottom"? How do they know the intentions of the artist / uploader? Can they read the artist's mind from behind a computer screen? How many children wear skin-colored swimwear? How many parents want their children to be paraded around a school pool in skin-colored swimwear? The people on Commons are denying the obvious and are making up excuses for the uploader to use later.

ED does a pretty good job at covering pedophiles, I'll give them that

Commons is now a Booru board http://gelbooru.com/index.php?page=post&s=list&tags=kasuga39

<whatevs>

Of course part of the Fox article motivation is a side swipe at the SOPA blackout.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16574977

Lil, I was just bitching about the fact that Selina had moved another one of my posts -- from this thread to another thread, without the usual notation that content had been moved. But then I decided it's her web domain, so she can shit on whomever she wants.

Ooohhh! Now I HAVE to write this up! People will refuse to believe it.....

It's an ink blot test!
I see an orc holding a sign which says 1/10. I wonder what that is?



Cleveland Steamer?

You should be able to find a few good quotes in the Fox News complains about porn on Commons again thread on Jimbo's talk page as well. Like –That tax-exempt educational content sure is in good hands.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=67623145:



This is a comment by the image's creator. The text in bold obviously indicates that it is supposed to be a bottomless lolicon. Paddy and Cirt are wrong.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=67632314



Paddy is "appalled and disgusted" that I suggested that wrong assumptions should be weighed less.

While it may be legal in some jurisdictions, as I have often pointed out, UK law deliberately closed the loophole of using artificial images to avoid pornography prosecutions and it would certainly be illegal in the UK. It doesn't really matter what Wikipedians say it is, it is down to a reasonable person's interpretation.

I think at some point Wikimedia will push the wrong buttons and it will be subject to a proper investigation. Jimbo panicked about it once, but did not solve the problem - the problem being the people running Commons who have a Free Culture attitude that is designed not to tolerate compromise. Now Jimbo is basing himself in the UK, he will find he cannot use the "they are not illegal" argument and his purge was long ago now to show that there was not the will to complete the task, it was for show.

The root cause of many of these problems is that wider Internet culture which makes it appear morally correct to defend freedoms of those who demand the right to indulge their whims. My biggest problem is that we see that WikiCulture gets dragged into the real world and here we have a group basically suggesting child porn is fine and it is a problem with the real world being closed minded or old fashioned.

In the real world I don't have a problem with people finding physically mature under-age teenagers sexually attractive, but then there is an adult responsibility not to take advantage of someone who might be mature physically but cannot be presumed to be mature mentally and socially (and an adult responsibility to discourage immature children from taking advantage of immature children, though Wikipedia culture seems to suggest that consensual underage sex is just educational). This is worse because it is encouraging sexual interest in children who are not mature physically, mentally or socially and people are being encouraged to believe that such interactions in the real world are right, proper and appropriate.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=67637614

Now Niabot is in denial. If the character really were wearing a "skin-colored bottom", then why did the image's creator KOKUYO suggest using the image on the "Hentai" or "Ecchi" articles? KOKUYO's suggestion only makes sense if the image were meant to be interpreted sexually, which would mean that the character is bottomless.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...&oldid=67644913

Instead of admitting that he or she was wrong about the "skin-colored bottom" that he or she conjured without evidence, Paddy has opted instead to use personal attacks.

Amazing. I post links to the "toothbrush" and "drinking" media search results in Commons and Wikipedia (returning a woman masturbating with a toothbrush and a porn performer drinking her urine, respectively, at the top of the search listing) on Jimbo's talk page, and within minutes, Fæ renames both files and speedies the originals.

I hope the curation effort doesn't stop there.

Yes the place is over a decade old and still full of porn pics, but you just fixed it.

Don't worry, the fight back has already started.

Even more worryingly, Fae's on our side I just can't keep up.

Metaphorical references to strange bedfellows should probably be avoided.

It is from jimbo's talk: