On Mon, Apr 2, 2012 at 8:41 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:

Two recent Buzzfeed articles:

1. Wikipedia's Gender Gap, As Measured By Famous Birthdays, by Anna North

http://www.buzzfeed.com/annanorth/wikipedias-gender-gap-as-measured-by-famou...

A gender gap continues to plague Wikipedia, and one of its main effects is on the kinds of people the encyclopedia considers noteworthy. We took a look at this through the lens of birthdays.

2. The Epic Battle For Wikipedia's Autofellatio Page, by Jack Stuef

In the underbelly of Wikipedia is an exhibitionist subculture dedicated to one thing: Ensuring that their penis is the visual definition of penis. Meet Jiffman, one such exhibitionist. (This article is very probably NSFW.)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jackstuef/inside-the-seedy-world-of-wikipedia-exhibi...

Thanks for bringing this to everyone's attention! I think this is useful insight into the motivations of people trying to get specific sexualized content onto Wikipedia in ways that aren't compatible with the overall goal of Wikipedia. Probably the discussion would have better results if participants acknowledged that perhaps not all attempts to get sexualized content on Wikipedia are motivated purely by the desire to educate, and not all attempts to remove it are motivated purely by prudery. Framing it as education vs. prudery makes only one outcome possible, we need to re-frame it in another way if we want change.

An interesting side note: I've been working the Wikipedia article for Mary Ware Dennett, who wrote a sex education pamphlet that was the subject of the court case that overturned the Comstock "anti-obscenity" laws in the United States. She ended up drawing her own diagrams of the sexual organs because she couldn't find any useful, medically accurate diagrams at the time! I strongly support Wikipedia as a medium to distribute information about human sexuality to empower people around the world, I'm far less enthusiastic about using it as a way to flash or gross out a larger audience. :)

-VAL