On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 9:09 PM, Delphine
Ménard
<notafishz@gmail.com>
wrote:
On Sat, Jun 2, 2012 at 4:57 PM, Andreas Kolbe
<
jayen466@gmail.com>
wrote:
> We are not talking about filtering standard sex
education images as you
[snip to spare Sarah's eyes, and mine]
Andreas, I use Wikipedia on a daily basis, not as an editor,
but as a
user, and the only times I've come across those things you
mention
were while reading your posts, emails and notes, and clicking
on links
*you* provided (or others having the same discourse), never
"by
chance". I am not saying the problem does not exist, I am the
first to
think that many Commons images need to be cleaned up (and not
only for
model release and obvious porn reasons, but for many others
too), but
I would be grateful if you could avoid emphasizing your point
in such
a crude way in every single email you write and derail
otherwise
important and interesting threads. Thanks.
Delphine and all,
I appreciate that these things are unpalatable – if they
weren't, there'd be no problem with Wikimedia hosting them
unfiltered, and this discussion would be moot. We are
labouring under what Larry has called the "yuck factor" here –
some things are just so unpalatable that people prefer not to
know, and not to get involved.
Saying and doing nothing about this topic would be an
option if these files were as obscure as your personal
experience of Wikimedia would suggest. If they got 10 or 12
views a day, say, there would hardly be much reason to make a
fuss.
But that is not the case.
The most extreme of the three examples I described in my
previous mail has been viewed more than 100,000 times this
year. It seems to have been well advertised, because it had
high viewing figures from day one, months before I ever learnt
about it or posted a link about it. Here are its viewing stats
for January, when it was uploaded:
This is from a film that is illegal to view or own in
dozens of countries around the world, including some Western
ones, or is at least restricted to showings in private sex
clubs. But at the present rate, it will have had about a
quarter of a million views on Wikimedia Commons by the end of
this year.
Now, given the volume of this demand – this file has been
in the Commons top-100 – we cannot simply operate a policy of
"out of sight, out of mind", because, while these matters may
be out of our minds, they are verifiably on the minds of tens
of thousands of others. A good proportion of them, certainly,
will be children and teenagers surfing in their bedrooms,
whose parents have told them that Wikimedia is a reputable
educational site that is good for them to view.
More such material will accumulate on Wikimedia servers as
time passes. We do need to think about our responsibilities
here. Are we really prepared to host everything, even the most
bizarre material, unfiltered?
Wikimedia is importing thousands of private images from
Flickr, where they are hosted responsibly, behind an age-18
wall, and shared among a limited and mutually consensual
audience, and is putting them on public view in Commons and
Wikipedia for a global audience. Helpful navigation templates
at the bottom of Wikipedia articles enable enquiring minds to
discover illustrated articles on sexual kinks they could not
even have dreamt existed. Is that wholly and unquestionably a
good thing?
There was a related article on this in the Telegraph
yesterday, "Don't tell my kids about your sex life":
The writer is making some valid points in that article.
Ironically, however, she names Wikipedia as one of the
sites where she believes this is NOT happening. That
assumption is flatly contradicted by viewing statistics like
those above.
Wikipedia is doing exactly that: it is a place where adults
tell a global audience that includes children about kinky sex.
And its status as an educational site, and the only major site
eschewing any kind of filtering, puts it at the forefront of
this effort.
Now it is absolutely true that children and adults can find
a far greater amount of explicit content elsewhere (provided
they have learnt in Wikipedia what to Google for ...). Kids
could find the original images we host in Flickr too, if their
curiosity was so great that they were prepared to lie about
their age. But the fact is, they don't.
Material like this may certainly have educational value, in
the right context. But we have a responsibility to follow
mainstream educational standards. A sexology course in
university may involve a video or live presentations of a
couple demonstrating BDSM techniques to students. This sort of
thing happens and is legitimate. Sex education in schools,
however, does not involve such graphic presentations. And I
think that is equally legitimate. One of the functions of a
filter is to make that difference clear.
The second function of the filter is of course to enable
adults who are really not interested in these topics to adjust
their settings in such a way that Wikimedia will not show them
kink or gore in response to innocuous searches – see
and
for an explanation of how or why this happens – much like
some of the contributors here feel this discussion itself is
an unwanted intrusion.
On that point, I am sorry to have raised these matters in a
manner that has seemed crude to some of you. I will take this
to heart, and think of ways to express myself in less
offensive ways. But we have to be clear and differentiate
between the criticism of religious fundamentalists, who might
object to a bikini shot and plain anatomical images, and the
question whether it is right for Wikimedia to host a growing
store of explicit images of the most bizarre kinds of kink
unfiltered.
Nobody (at least not me, nor Larry, as far as I can see)
advocates a filter that would prevent children from viewing
sex-educational material on Wikipedia, and drive them to porn
sites instead to learn about sex. As far as I am concerned,
everything that is well and good in schools could remain
entirely unfiltered here.
But material that is borderline illegal, or that is subject
to strict age restrictions in the real world, or that is
imported from sites where it is hosted in an age-restricted
section, should be behind a filter (which, after all, can
still be bypassed by anyone – of any age – who is curious
enough).
Andreas