Niabot has just come up with what I think is a great idea for addressing the search problem you mention in your postscript. He's proposed a clustered search function. (Anybody remember Vivísimo?)
This could not just solve the problem of NSFW media popping up unexpectedly in media searches in Wikipedias and Commons. It would generally make Commons' search function more user-friendly, by grouping search results according to categories. So adult media would no longer pop up in the middle of unrelated searches, monarch butterflies would be separated from other types of monarch, etc.
(If you are unfamiliar with the Commons search problem please see
And see (note that this link is NSFW)
for what the forefinger search looks like in Wikipedia.)
Beyond wanting to drop the list a note about Niabot's idea, I also just meant to ask the question that MZMcBride asked above. What is the status of the image filter? Last year, we heard that in January, developers would sift through the proposals on the Meta brainstorming pages, and select one for implementation. But now it is March, and nothing seems to be happening. Where are we on this?
Andreas