There have been a number of discussion on the English Wikipedia lately (sparked, of course, by the Virgin Killer image controversy) on the propriety of various images and the need for retaining them on Wikipedia. This is a problem that has a long history on Wikipedia, and a number of controls are in place - limited ability to post explicit images on new articles, some filtering of newly uploaded images to delete those that are obviously duplicative, exhibitionist, etc. Many comments we've had in the last few days concerned the legality of various images, particularly where consent is not demonstrated or verifiable. I've commented [1] that the legality issue shouldn't be a major concern for English Wikipedia editors, because the Foundation itself ought to have limited liability and the individual uploaders have primary culpability for any illegal images.

But I still think that there is a community issue here, and I wonder if someone can fill in the details on how we currently deal with it. How well is the Commons guideline COM:PEOPLE enforced with respect to sexual images? Do the many projects with separate image databases generally have similar guidelines? Does anyone know how well they are enforced? In a discussion this past weekend someone else and I were discussing examples of problem images, where the person in an explicit photograph is of questionable age.

I realized after a quick survey on Commons of image origins that many of the explicit images are sourced to a single Flickr account. The license of the images was verified closer to the time of upload, but since then the Flickr account has been deactivated. We have no knowledge of the consent of the photographed models, nor any mechanism for verifying their age, and many if not most of the images are unused on Wikipedia projects (which is true, I suspect, for many sexually explicit photographs in general). The whole category of images [3] was previously put up for deletion [2] but the discussion was closed in favor of individual image reviews, which I understand mostly closed as keep.

I don't think the Foundation itself can or should do anything about this issue in most cases, but I think the topic deserves some wider discussion and reconsideration - not necessarily as a response to the IWF debacle, but taking that as an opportunity to get a wider audience.

Of note is Jimmy's recommendation to the en.wp community (I assume, since it was posted there) for this sort of reconsideration. [4]

Nathan

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&curid=98... [2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Peter_Klashorst_... [3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Peter_Klashorst [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&curid=98...