On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 6:06 AM, Todd Allen toddmallen@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, actually, along with several other educational ones, some with children's games, her school website, etc. The chances that she would randomly stumble across a sexual image on Wikipedia are -vanishingly- slim, ...
There is another aspect to this, which is that Wikipedia presently gives undue weight to the weird, bizarre and even the completely made-up. To give an example: every kid will look up the word fuck at some point in their lives. Wikipedia offers, at the bottom of that article, the sexual slang template
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Sexual_slang
with links to (partly illustrated) articles on a whole slew of weird and obscure practices, while missing out many of the slang terms ordinary people actually use in the bedroom. Basically, it's urban dictionary, written for the lulz, rather than sex education.
Even the article on the humble gel bracelet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel_bracelet
contains more about a sexual urban legend than anything else, and it too comes with a template offering helpful links to Wikipedia's bizarre world of sex.
Larry recently illustrated another way in which kids can come across Wikimedia's wealth of sexual media:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE4Z9qunAc4
As Seth Finkelstein pointed out the other day, there is opposition to pornography both from the right, on a family values basis, and from the left, from feminists countering male bias. These are quite separate, but equally valid concerns.
It's not for nothing for example that Anita Sarkeesian's article was vandalised with porn. Male-fantasy porn expresses male dominance; in this case, it was used to emphatically reassert that dominance, because Sarkeesian had threatened it. It's as symbolic as the babe calendar on the office wall: it signals that women don't have much to say in that office, and can be greeted with cat calls or put-downs.
I am not against pornography per se. I just wish that if the projects have it, they'd handle it responsibly, the way everybody else does quite naturally. That means with respect for subject privacy, gender issues, child protection issues, and so forth. Just be professional about it and follow best practice.
Andreas