[WikiEN-l] WikiProject Decency

Wed Aug 17 14:20:35 UTC 2005

That's a pretty ugly discussion, but reading over their (somewhat
misguided) page does bring up one possible addition to the discussion
on "inappropriate" images which I didn't see raised before.

Namely, if the English Wiki servers are hosted in a U.S. state, then
the site does, if I am not mistaken, fall under various laws about the
distribution of "obscene" images to minors. "Obscene" is of course a
subject term, in the legal realm as well as here, but there is some
precedent which could allow one to make such decisions.

Now this isn't a plea to delete such images; it's a point of departure
for thinking about them. If images which would very likely count as
"obscene" under that particular state law (Florida?) were able to be
X-ed out (that is, their presence would be visible, even though their
content would not be) by default, and could be "enabled" by people who
swore that they were not minors (or didn't live in the U.S.), wouldn't
that solve a few problems at once? Those who are worried about seeing
a nipple wouldn't by default, while those who wanted to see them could
easily do so, and instead of doing it under the guise of someone's
projected "decency", we were doing it simply to comply with U.S. law
(blame  U.S. prudery on this all you want, but I'm betting laws of a
similar sort, though with different boundaries set, exist in most
countries).

Well.. it's a thought. I'm not interested in playing nanny to the
world but I am interested in Wikipedia being legally safe. An
additional thought which occurred to me is that I'm fairly sure a
federal law was passed not too long ago which requires age
verification information for nude models to be hosted by the website
hosting their pictures (proof that they are at least 18 years old). If
that's the case, that's another unpleasant legal/technical thing to
think about.

FF

On 8/17/05, Ryan Delaney <ryan.delaney at gmail.com> wrote:
> There's quite a stink going on about this
> [[Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedians_for_Decency]] and its ensuing VfD. I
> think the project is totally bogus and un-Wiki, but I'm interested in
> what some other people (Jimbo, although I somehow doubt he would want to
> go near this one) have to say about it.
> 
> Anyway, I pity the admin who closes that VfD.
> 
> - Ryan
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