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

Tue Feb 15 03:40:34 UTC 2005

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 03:09:56 -0000 (GMT), Tony Sidaway
<minorityreport at bluebottle.com> wrote:
> Skyring said:
> >
> > I agree, but the inevitable result of allowing offensive images,
> > especially sexually explicit images, to be freely available to anyone
> > who looks up Wikipedia is that there will be strong and vocal
> > opposition, and millions of US schoolchildren will be denied access.
> > The more well-known Wikipedia becomes, the sooner this will happen. I
> > really cannot blame parents, school boards and other community leaders
> > if they act to prevent children from accessing graphic images such as a
> > bloke sucking himself off, but such action would also deny children
> > access to thousands of well-researched articles which are not in
> > themselves offensive.
> 
> This is going to happen anyway.  We have an article on Donkey Punch and
> one on Dirty Sanchez, and those alone, unillustrated, are enough to take
> Wikipedia well out of the realm of the child-safe.  If we can agree that
> there will be a demand for a child-safe fork of Wikipedia, let us start
> formulate the policies and mechanisms that will enable us build it in
> tandem with the main one.  There's no need for us to bowdlerize our main
> fork if all we need do is produce a child-safe website containing filtered
> content on those subject that would be of interest to K12.

You're right. It's not just images.

A thought occurred to me that it would be reasonably easy for any
zealot to show that Wikipedia is the devil's tool. Just as we get
vandals who think it is fun to replace a well-presented informative
article on the River Nile with a few obscenities - and this is
literally child's play - so too we might get zealots who can arrange
for an article to contain objectionable material just in time for them
to "discover" it at a press conference.

"Here is Wikipedia's article on Our Lord, Jesus Christ," the Reverend
Hardmind might say, opening up the article and showing that the
Messiah is bending over to receive the divine blessing of twelve
disciples, their robes around their ankles and their smiles around
their ears.

Never mind that the image was inserted only minutes previously. The
damage has been done.

-- 
Peter in Canberra