[Foundation-l] video presentation on explicit images on WMF projects

Thu Jan 14 16:03:16 UTC 2010

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 8:59 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>

> As for the link, showing these in greatly enlarged  versions, without
> the context of the articles in which they are used, is setting up a
> strong bias. We've never engaged in that use of the material, nor
> would we. If people want to take our material out of our encyclopedic
> content and turn it into sexually-focused presentations, that is their
> look-out.

What if they aren't used in an encyclopedic context?

PM says he highlighted 17 images [1].

Assuming Commons "Global File Links" is accurate then these images
appear on 27 content pages in Wikipedias and Wikibooks (not counting
User and Talk pages, etc.).  However, two of the images account for 16
of the uses, and 10 of the 17 images are not used on any project at
all.  This is of course a largely anecdotal sample (and there is no
reason to assume that PM's set is random), but my personal impression
has been similar.  It seems to like we have seen a rise in unused
sexual imagery being stored at Commons.

I'll happily defend the usefulness of sexual imagery in many of the
places where it is used, but there are downsides to allowing such
collections grow far beyond the applications we have for them.

-Robert Rohde

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Privatemusings/ImagesUsedInVideoPresentation