[Foundation-l] Censorship: Speedy deletion of porn articles

Fri Mar 9 19:06:55 UTC 2007

Yonatan Horan wrote:
> The question here isn't about notability. The two examples given by geni are
> well notable in Israel and Hebrew-speaking culture (even those who are for
> the deletion of all porn articles will say that). The problem is that the
> articles aren't judged on a case-by-case basis, if they have anything to do
> with porn, it is very likely that they will be very quickly speedy deleted.
> You can't ban a whole subject on a wikipedia just because you don't like it.
> By the way, I am well aware of what goes on on the English Wikipedia as I am
> more active there than on the Hebrew one and I'm not saying the Hebrew
> Wikipedia needs to allow articles on many esoteric porn actors like en but
> by the same token they can't just delete articles on porn (especially not
> notable subjects) without passing a vote to make this policy and without
> complying with WMF guidelines.
>
> Thanks,
> Yonatan
>   
There are often times "informal" or "defacto" policies, that while they 
are not necessarily "ratified" or "official", do tend to influence the 
decisions of administrators on a given project.  I will note especially 
on en.wikibooks this has been a fairly common practice, although efforts 
to move some of the unofficial policies (even when written down) into an 
official status has some momentum.  It would take somebody with a 
sociology degree to try and explain why some policies may get this 
defacto status over others, but it is something I have seen especially 
on the smaller wikis.  The larger communities tend to be more formal 
mainly because there is usually somebody to challenge the policy unless 
it is official.  Both that and there tends to be less communication 
between the admins on larger projects to discuss general philosophies.

Certainly by almost any measure, he.wikipedia has a much smaller 
community than en.wikipedia, so you shouldn't expect the same sort of 
rigid social heirarchy and policy structure to be the same on both projects.

I will also admit that smaller projects have a tendancy of being 
influenced by a single individual or a small group of like minded 
individuals that can push their opinions onto the rest of the project.  
As long as there is room for opposing viewpoints and a chance to reverse 
policies, I don't see this as a a serious problem.  At the extreme is 
when somebody can't edit due to significant differences in opinions, and 
the people opposing the content editing is an an administrator or 
bureaucrat position.

The added problem here is that pornography is also a very strong 
religious issue, and is also illegal in many places as well... even 
"softcore" porn.  The issues and justifications for keeping it is 
similar to arguments that can be made about articles or books (for 
Wikibooks) about engaging in illegal activities.  This became a major 
issue on en.wikibooks when the "Manual of Crime" was created, which was 
more or less a how-to book about engaging in various criminal activities 
such as money laundering, extortion, rape, and murder.  This book (with 
a strong prompting by Jimbo) was eventually deleted, and policies now 
exist to keep similar content from being created.  Still, the arguments 
about where the line to censor Wikimedia projects against content of 
this nature is an ongoing point of discussion, as clearly some content 
is simply too far "out there" to reasonably consider worth our time.

One of the strong arguments in favor of removing some of this material 
is also "how much does this detract from the main mission of the 
project?"  If keeping a specific kind of content is going to generate so 
much controversy that it keeps the rest of the project from being 
written, perhaps as a practical matter it should simply be banned and 
deleted.  It should be noted that this says nothing about the nature of 
the content, but is more a way to cope with the social nature that we 
all have, and the fact that some things certainly would be much more 
controversial in some cultures than others.  Porn on the Dutch Wikipedia 
may not be controversial at all, but it would be a huge deal on the 
Arabic Wikipedia., for example.  But articles about the Aryan Nations 
and other neo-Nazi groups would have problems on the German Wikipedia 
instead.  This certainly was the excuse that was used for removing the 
video game books from en.wikibooks, even though it is clear that writing 
a book about the video game "America's Army" (one of the larger books 
formerly on Wikibooks) can hardly be called writing about illegal activity.

-- Robert Horning