On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com> wrote: Yes, the two big stumbling blocks for making mirrors are: 1) No recent good full dump of enwiki (last complete one was Jan '07) 2) That amount of data is impractical to import to the target database. enwiki dump. I've been trying to get the last good dump imported to a database as an exercise in futility for several months now. My experiences thus far have been mostly annoying. Trying to fork needs a good base of data to start from (even if it is 2 1/2 years old). If you can't start there, it's nearly impossible, as importing page-by-page is entirely impractical and probably impossible (can you import faster than pages are being edited?) -Chad

Anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't censored because it allows pictures of penises is fooling himself. Wikipedia is absolutely censored from images its editors find disgusting. Most of its editors find sexual images just fine, and a large percentage view their suppression as harmful, "sex-negative", based on obsolete religious practice, whatever, so they're allowed. Look at David Goodman's message earlier for a good example of this. Sexual images aren't allowed because Wikipedia isn't censored, they're allowed because the predominant view of sex among Wikipedians is that it's a recreation like any other. If you think Wikipedia's imagery is not censored, please explain why [[Goatse.cx]] does not have an image of its subject matter. Such an image would clearly fall under our fair use criteria, wouldn't it? It's definitely essential for understanding of the material. But how long do you think the image would last if someone added it? I'd be surprised if no one tried to add it before, in fact. I'd also be surprised if anyone could even upload the image without having it speedy deleted as vandalism and getting a warning that they'd be blocked if they did it again. [[Nick Berg]] is primarily known because of the beheading video released about him, but his article chooses for some reason to depict a still from the video where he's still alive, rather than depicting the act of beheading itself. I would argue that the beheading part of the video is very educational. Most people's ideas of what beheading is like come from the movies, and are terribly inaccurate. Do you think anyone would object if I added a picture of the knife passing through his neck up at the top? Somehow I think so. Can anyone name me even *one* article where a gruesomely gory photograph is prominently displayed, in fact? There have been edit wars even on more moderately disgusting articles, like [[Human feces]], with no clear "Wikipedia is not censored!" resolution. Why? Because people don't like looking at images that are disgusting. Real surprise, huh? But Wikipedia isn't censored, right? Sexual images are not kept because Wikipedia is not censored. They're kept because the Wikipedia community thinks that people *shouldn't* find them disgusting. This does not serve our readers well and is definitely not neutral. We absolutely should accommodate readers who would be viscerally disgusted by images on the site. There are people out there, probably a billion of them or more, whose reaction to an image of autofellatio would be comparable to their reaction to an image of a beheading or Goatse. Saying "screw you" to all these people rather than attempting to improve the utility of Wikipedia for them is obnoxious, antisocial, and contrary to our mission. Anyone who claims that it's too hard to draw a line of what should be censored and what shouldn't is demonstrably wrong, because Wikipedia has done it for more than eight years, and no one seems to have even *noticed* that the line *exists*. Trying to claim we can't censor sexual images because it's a slippery slope is not only bad logic, but grossly hypocritical. There is *no* loss in educational value if explicit sexual images are not displayed inline. None. Prominent links can be provided for readers who are interested. On the other hand, there is a significant loss if parents want to stop their children from reading Wikipedia because it contains offensive imagery. The way our mission points is therefore clear. Are we going to try to be the best educational resource we can be, or impose a sexually liberal ideology on all our readers whether they like it or not? On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com> wrote: It would definitely be a good start to create a hierarchy of categories for the use of private parties who would like to censor their own Internet access, or that of those they have responsibility for. The way to go would be neutral designations like "Category:Pictures containing genitals", "Category:Pictures containing breasts", "Category:Depictions of Muhammad", and so on. This strictly adds value to the project. Then we would pick a set of categories to be blocked by default. Blocked images wouldn't be hidden entirely, just replaced with a link explaining why they were blocked. Clicking the link would cause them to display in place, and inline options would be provided to show all images in that category in the future (using preferences for users, otherwise cookies). Users could block any categories of images they liked from their profile. To begin with, we could preserve the status quo by disabling only very gory or otherwise really disgusting images by default. More reasonably, we could follow every other major website in the developed world, and by default disable display of any image containing male or female genitalia, or sex acts. Users who wanted the images could, again, get them with a single click, so there is no loss of information -- which is, after all, what we exist to provide. Wikipedia does not aim to push ideologies of sexual liberation.

My two cents: I don't think we have external pressure to do this. Web filtering companies which filter by keyword are aware Wikipedia contains a lot of those naughty keywords. Anything they think they need to do about it they already do. OTRS hasn't been seeing parental complaints, we haven't seen negative coverage in the press, etc. We don't make a huge deal about it, but I think that "the world at large" knows what we do and is OK with it. The internal enwiki community is very anti-censorship, in particular anti-think-of-the-children censorship. It's one of the core NOT listings. I understand that we have many who disagree. But I think that the community has spoken, and that the Foundation wouldn't do any good interfering, and that there's no cause to. If the community were threatening its own good or long term survival by being that uncensored a case could be made for intervention. But we seem to have found a working line that essentially everyone agrees to that pedophillia and child porn are out, the rest is all basically ok, and that these limits are legally and socially defensible internally and externally. -- -george william herbert george.herbert(a)gmail.com