[WikiEN-l] Re: Writing about sexual topics responsibly is not censorship

Tue Feb 15 02:08:31 UTC 2005

On Tue, Feb 15, 2005 at 09:45:29AM +1100, Skyring wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005 12:20:45 -0800 (PST), Rick <giantsrick13 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > We've had this discussion on several pages.  Nobody can agree on
> > what "explicit images" means.  Do we slap that tag on the pictures
> > from Abu Graib?  From Auschwitz?  From Dresden?  How about images of
> > Adolf Hitler and George Bush?
> 
> I would say that images which would not normally be found in school
> encyclopaedias or museums such as the Smithsonian would be a good rule
> of thumb, and I'm not just talking about sexual images.

The Smithsonian, of course, is the work of the U.S. government, which
has all manner of politically-driven standards it must follow.  This is
not a problem we have.

> I was in the Holocaust Museum in Washington a few weeks back and
> although schoolchildren are welcomed and encouraged to attend, certain
> exhibitions had warnings posted at the entrance. And rightly so.

I was in the National Museum of the American Indian a few months ago.  I
was surprised by how -little- there was about the bloodier and more
unpleasant parts of the history.  I don't know if that's because the
museum operators chose to exhibit mostly "friendly" or "politically
correct" bits, or because people with a well-deserved grudge didn't care
to participate in creating the museum.  Or maybe I somehow missed the
wing with the smallpox blankets and the Trail of Tears.

> I don't think there is any hard and fast guide as to what exactly
> makes an image offensive, disturbing or explicit, but I think that the
> Wikipedia community could be trusted to find a consensus on a case by
> case basis. My feeling is that the Autofellatio photograph would be
> generally agreed as being one that should not be generally accessible
> to schoolchildren.

My opinion is that the Autofellatio photograph is not a very good image
for an encyclopedia ... *not* because it depicts a man licking his
penis, but because it is stylistically poor and unfitting.

Likewise, my opinion is that the Goatse.cx image is not fitting for
Wikipedia because displaying it is far too close to *participating* in
the trolling-behavior with which that image is so closely linked.

Schoolchildren don't much enter into it.

> I use schoolchildren as an example, not because I want to emasculate
> or prudify Wikipedia to the level that it offends nobody, but because
> schoolchildren are prime users of information resources such as
> Wikipedia, and the last thing we should do is to make it difficult for
> them to use Wikipedia. I know that some people here think that
> individula users should accept all responsibility, but many teachers
> and parents don't see it that way.

I'm guessing that by saying that we would "make it difficult for school-
children to use Wikipedia" you mean that by depicting sexuality frankly
we would tickle the sensors of [[censorware]] programs, causing
Wikipedia to be blocked.

Sadly, there are many fools in the world, and fools appear to be the
chief market for censorware.  Both the flaws and the deliberate biases
of popular censorware products have been more than adequately
demonstrated.  We are talking about software which already regularly
blocks educational material on breast cancer and HIV/AIDS; which has
been found to selectively block pro-choice (abortion-rights) sites but
not pro-life (anti-abortion) sites; and which in one case has blocked
TIME Magazine's Web site when TIME criticized censorware.

(See http://www.peacefire.org/info/blocking-software-faq.html.)

I don't see any way Wikipedia can benefit from kowtowing to that kind of
nonsense.  If Wikipedia is blocked by censorware, so much the worse for
censorware; it will be one more illustration of its uselessness and one
more charge to be brought against its use.

> I was engaged in discussion in another forum, and someone brought up
> an example of the Wikipedia article on the Nile River. An innocuous
> article, one might imagine, but it so happened that at the time my
> correspondent was opening it up for the benefit of a schoolchild it
> had recently been vandalised and consisted of nothing but obscenities.

This sounds to me like you're comparing people who upload controversial
images with people who vandalize Wikipedia.  That doesn't seem to me
like a very productive comparison to make.

> Maybe we should be thinking about having default material that is
> known to be in a useful and "safe" state and that the "live" material
> can only be accessed by specifically setting some flag or clicking on
> an accept button or some similar mechanism.

Wikipedia's job is to describe the world, and the world is "live" and
not "safe", too.

-- 
Karl A. Krueger <kkrueger at whoi.edu>