--- On Wed, 16/2/11, ChaoticFluffy <chaoticfluffy@gmail.com> wrote:
From: ChaoticFluffy <chaoticfluffy@gmail.com>
> Joseph and Andreas, I think you're assuming facts not in evidence here, so to
> speak. If you disapprove of porn or the pornmaking process, that's got nothing
> to do with wikipedia.
Whether a woman in Budapest derives sexual pleasure from receiving five facials
a week from ten men for $200 a go, as some Wikipedians appear to believe, is not
actually the issue here. The issue is this:
Wikipedia’s mission is to reflect coverage in reliable sources. We have basic policy
commitments to that effect – WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV. When it comes to sexual
or otherwise controversial images, we should be featuring the same types of
illustrations that reliable sources writing about these matters use. We should be
neither more liberal nor less liberal than topical sources are, on balance.
What happens in Wikipedia is that editors argue that we are bound to reliable sources
in text, but not in illustrations. As far as illustrations are concerned, NOTCENSORED
applies. NOTCENSORED is touted as the community’s right to substitute its own
editorial judgment in matters of illustration for the editorial judgments made by reliable
sources. Our demographics are skewed. The typical Wikipedian is an 18-year-old,
single childless male. As far as we can tell, women make up about 1/8 of our editorship.
Compounding matters, women comment very rarely at discussions concerned with
curating sexology articles. (Three cheers for Carol!)
There is no support in basic policy for the position that Wikipedia should knowingly,
wilfully and systematically depart from the standards espoused by reliable sources
when it comes to sexually explicit images. Yet this is what happens. We don’t do
this in our articles on dinosaurs, say. Our illustrations of dinosaurs look just like
the illustrations of dinosaurs in reliable sources.
This is just a gap that has opened up in our policy fabric. As a result, we are at times
more explicit, gratuitous or inept in our use of sexual or pornographic images in
Wikipedia than reliable sources would choose to be, as in the examples discussed
(and, in part, since addressed on-wiki).
Remember that these articles are some of our most frequently accessed. Both the
Creampie article and the Bukkake article e.g. are ranked among our top articles by page
views (ranks 1,300 and 2,000 or thereabouts). They are viewed significantly more often
than Hilary Clinton’s biography, say.
Frequently viewed articles like that are calling cards. They tell readers and potential
new contributors what we are about.
What we should be about is what reliable sources are about. This is not about protecting
women; it is about protecting Wikipedia from becoming something else than an
educational resource. Women do however have a key role in that, and the gender
gap is intimately related to this issue. What sets reliable sources apart from porn sites
is that reliable sources are written for a mixed readership, just like Wikipedia should be.
Reliable sources – newspapers and scholarly writing – take women’s views into
account. Our editorial process does a poor job of doing that, and the general gender gap
as well as the even more extreme gender gap in curating these articles compounds the
issue.
One thing we could do to address this, beyond increased female participation, is to
enshrine in policy the principle that editorial standards for article illustration should not
depart significantly and systematically from editorial standards in reliable sources.
That would help address the problem.
Andreas
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