The image is an excellent illustration of its subject. However I would prefer a policy which excluded both it and the article in which it is used as an illustration. I'm not sure how the policy should be elaborated in our policy pages, but essentially this sort of material is incompatible with our core mission, to provide an accessible compendium of knowledge to the world. I was discussing Wikipedia with a Mohs surgeon the other day, he happened to be a Mormon. Other than the articles on dermatology and Mohs surgery, we talked about his 13 year old daughter who had been discouraged by her school from using Wikipedia. An article such as Pearl necklace (sexuality) adds little to a girl's knowledge base in comparison to the barrier it raises to her use of the encyclopedia. I suggest that Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not include Wikipedia is not a manual of sexual practices. It could be phrased Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra. Fred Bauder

Just a mistake Oscar, but Karma is indeed the issue. We need to do the right thing. Fred

Hoi, As there are people who care about this, would you please tone down a bit? It does not matter what you believe or do not believe, you should respect other people. Going on a tangent like this is not appropriate. Thanks, GerardM 2009/5/14 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com>

It is never too late to quit doing a dumb thing. I might find gifting someone with a nice pearl necklace a fine thing to do, but unlike comprehensive information about sexuality, it doesn't belong in a general purpose encyclopedia intended and promoted for the use of a young world wide audience. As to censorship, we censor and delete dictionary definitions and recipes for God's sake; that is how Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not works. Fred Bauder

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Perhaps this is off-topic, but I wanted to say it for a long time. The more time passes, the more I wonder if people who work on Wikipedia have ever seen an encyclopedia. On Wikipedia, dictionary definitions and image galleries are forbidden, and stubs are frowned upon. Yet every encyclopedia I have ever seen has dictionary definitions, and image galleries, and stubs-a-plenty. I guess that conclusion is that we are doing something wrong.

Michael Peel wrote: Wiktionary has dictionary definitions, but they can't be expanded to cover what encyclopedic aspects of the topic could be covered. Commons has image galleries, but it does not have encyclopedic image galleries. Commons galleries feature images based on their aesthetic value, but do not offer encyclopedic information about the topic that should be presented by the images. People dislike stubs. Sometimes, stubs get deleted because they have too little information, even while they are about a valid topic. Sometimes, stubs get merged into larger articles with suspicious choice of topic. Sometimes, stubs get converted into redirects to articles on similar topics, where information contained in the stubs is eventually lost. All of this is done in cases where a traditional encyclopedia would have stubs.

Michael Peel wrote: And aterwards, I'd expect WP:AFD to be applied. I have once made http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_gallery_of_toucans that was deleted. Let's say it was similar to http://www.emeraldforestbirds.com/EmeraldGallery.htm and I believe you will find such a gallery is encyclopedic.

John Vandenberg wrote: I'm glad someone saved it :) However in some cases, number of images in such a gallery may be too big to merge it with a page on a similar topic. Commons is not an encyclopedia. Galleries of this type do not exist on Commons, and do not really belong there.

Gerard Meijssen wrote: Your thanks may be misplaced. It is abundantly clear that your statement that there are people who care about this is quite overstated. So just get off your high horse yourself, or be taken down. Please have a civil tongue. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen.

2009/5/14 Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>et>: Why shouldn't it be? Most humans engage in sexual practices of some kind or another, so I would think our content on sexual practices would be relevant to many of our readers. You suggest we should treat content on sexual practices differently to how we treat content on sporting practices because some of our readers may be minors. I am not going to dispute the cultural relativity of what is suitable for minors at the moment, but if we were to make the assumption that some content is not suitable for minors (or, more to the point, that because some content is considered unsuitable for minotrs, Wikipedia is being discouraged at school), isn't there a better solution than deleting content? For example, couldn't articles be tagged with a "this article details sexual practices which some readers may feel is not suitable for minors"? Articles with such a tag could be blocked in user preferences, or for school IP ranges at the request of the school. We could explain the tag at [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia for schools]] and explain how it is used. I, personally, contend the premise that some content is inherently unsuitable for minors. It really comes down to what some sections of society consider unsuitable. For example, a Mormon parent's idea of what is unsuitable, may differ to a Protestant parent's idea of what is unsuitable - leaving alone the many possible non-Christian variations. The point is that "suitability" is culturally relative. Some parents may think it unsuitable at all to describe genital organs or reproduction, many would think it entirely suitable. If we are to honour removal/selective blocking of content on the grounds that it is sexual, should we also honour a Mormon's parent's requests to block the [[Joseph Smith]] article, which may give details that are unpalatable to Mormons? Should we selectively block articles relating to non-belief to honour parent's concerns as to what their children are exposed to? It is a very slippery slope. I post the suggestion above about tagging articles that may be considered inappropriate by some, because it is better to give people tools to block content if they choose to, than to delete content on that basis. -- Oldak Quill (oldakquill(a)gmail.com)

2009/5/14 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>: Or - how could I forget, the example of an actually good selection of Wikipedia that's proving very popular indeed with school teachers: http://www.schools-wikipedia.org/ - d.

El 5/14/09 11:50 PM, David Gerard escribió: IMO there's unlikely to be much specific interest in a censored copy of any one particular site. Such filtering is generally done at the local installation level: workplaces, schools, and homes purchasing censorware proxies or enabling "parental controls" on their AOL etc. Of course such censorware systems usually have secret blacklists, poor controls, tend to block sites whose politics they disagree with, etc -- but that's where the market demand for filtering is currently served. -- brion

2009/5/14 Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>et>: What about pictures of Muhammad? Descriptions of Chinese human rights violations? Articles about evolution? etc. etc. etc. The reason that Wikipedia is not censored is because we cannot censor one thing and maintain neutrality without censoring everything else that might offend somebody and we would end up without anything left.

2009/5/14 Fred Bauder <fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net>et>: There is no name for it because it is not false. When I appear in public I wear clothing in keeping with the local cultural norms. That is not neutral. I am not neutral. I have never claimed to be and never will (except in very specific contexts). I, however, am not Wikipedia.

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Though technically challenging, I've long believed that the best answer is to develop some system similar to Categories that could be used to flag content that is potentially objectionable on various grounds and then provide the tools to create filtered streams that remove that content. I'd especially like to be able to offer schools a feed that filters out the adult content. Obviously any system that depends on editors to maintain the flags would be imperfect and subject to various issues, but I do think making a good faith effort to provide culturally sensitive variants of Wikipedia would be very useful from a public relations standpoint and allow Wikipedia to reach audiences that might otherwise be excluded. -Robert Rohde

El 5/14/09 7:31 PM, Thomas Dalton escribió: IMHO any restriction that's not present in the default view isn't likely to accomplish much. The answer an objecting parent wants to "my daughter saw a lady with semen on her neck on your website" is *not* "you should have told her to log in and check 'no sexual imagery' in her profile"! Slippery-slope arguments aside, it seems unfortunate that as creators of "educational resources" we don't actually have anything that's being created with a children's audience in mind -- Wikipedia is primarily being created *by adults for adults*. That's fine for us grown-ups but we're missing an important part of the educational "market". Like it or not, part of creating educational material for children is cultural sensitivity: you need to make something that won't freak out their parents. The challenge here isn't technical, but political/cultural; choosing how to mark things and what to mark for a default view is quite simply _difficult_ as there's such a huge variance in what people may find objectionable. Sites like Flickr and Google image search keep this to a single toggle; the default view is a "safe" search which excludes items which have been marked as "adult" in nature, while making it easy to opt out of the restricted search and get at everything if you want it. Generally sexual imagery is the prime target since it's the biggest hot-button "save the children" issue for most people -- many parents wouldn't be happy to have their kid read "list of sexual positions" but would rather they read the text than see the pictures, even if they're drawings. Ultimately it may be most effective to implement something like this (basically an expansion of the "bad image list" implemented long ago for requiring a click-through on certain images which were being frequently misused in vandalism) in combination with a push to create distinct resources which really *are* targeted at kids -- an area in which multiple versions targeted to different cultural groups are more likely to be accepted than the "one true neutral article" model of Wikipedia. -- brion

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 2:03 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote: I don't think it's so straightforward. While I agree that a clinical approach has drawbacks, the whole point of such an approach to, e.g., sexual content is to avoid implicit value judgments. Compare the pearl necklace photo with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Semfac01.png ; neither is clinical, but either one, I would argue, has the potential to violate NPOV unless properly contextualized and captioned. In this case, having a single pearl necklace image with woman who appears to enjoy it may carry the message not just that "a woman as well as a man might enjoy the practice", but that a woman should or usually does enjoy it. And some cultural critics have argued that some sex acts that have been emphasized in mainstream pornography normalize humiliation of women through sex (see [[Facial (sex act)]] for some discussion of this). My point is that a sex-positive message may be even more problematic than a clinical one; if every sex act is illustrated with the subjects appearing to enjoy it, that gives the implicit message that, e.g., women are equally likely to enjoy any of them--which is manifestly not the case. But of course this is mostly a moot point. Our sexology coverage really weak, and nuances of images and POV are minor compared to textual deficiencies in sex articles. -Sage (User:Ragesoss)

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 10:29 AM, Brion Vibber &lt;brion(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: <snip> I would suggest that a "child-safe" version of Wikipedia be cloaked with its own domain syntax in a way similar to secure.wikimedia.org. That would allow schools and parents to block the main site while providing access to an alternative that they might find more acceptable. Since domain level filtering is already commonly employed by many software packages I don't think that would be an unreasonable thing to ask. Choosing what filtered views of Wikipedia to provide at a domain level would require some discussion of course as well as some form of social agreement about what content belongs behind the filter. Not easy issues at all, but making a good faith effort to address them would be huge in my mind. -Robert Rohde

2009/5/14 Sage Ross &lt;ragesoss+wikipedia(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Schools Wikipedia, or similar distributions. What you're talking about with "reach out" is limiting the contents of the live working site. - d.

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 4:50 PM, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: No, I'm talking about something like actively including meta-data that would make possible filtered.en.wikipedia.org or the like (as Robert Rohde described), not imposing any limits on the way readers currently view Wikipedia. In fact, it wouldn't even have to be directly incorporated into editing; it could be a separate layer of meta-data, such that all the filtering happens through a "flag offensive content" interface at the filtered wikipedia site; users interested in a filtered site would do all the flagging and it could even be fine-grained so that objectionable content could be sorted by type. So, for example, the pearl necklace photo would get flagged as sexual, Muhammad cartoons would be flagged as Islam-related, etc. -Sage

David Gerard hett schreven: <http://sep11.wikipedia.org/> does still work by the way. Marcus Buck User:Slomox

While this may be true for Wikipedia (English Wikipedia?), it is certainly not true of Wikimedia project generally. For example, Wikibooks has a subproject Wikijunior which is an attempt to create high-quality children's books. Part of the defined scope here is that the books are appropriate for children. While I despise censorship (cf my recent posts, or my statements on Commons) this is commendable in my mind. Though I don't participate in generating content for Wikijunior on a regular basis, I do think it is a worthwhile project, and is an important alternative to be mentioned during such discussions. There is a safe sandbox at Wikijunior (well, semi-safe, English Wikibooks still gets vandalism, though we now have FlaggedRevs [which could use a config change; it's in bugzilla :D]) where people concerned with such things can generate appropriately-censored content for children. -Mike On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 10:29 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:

Re : This from brion; On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Brion Vibber &lt;brion(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: This is exceptionally heartening from my perspective - I believe a very simple and straightforward system like this would help a great deal. It is of course a great strength of wiki-processes to be able to allow large groups of volunteers to maintain appropriate image descriptive tagging which could power such a system - I've said before that I'm a little surprised that it's not embraced as a good way forward - but either ways, it's a good thing in my book. I believe this would be a valuable (and necessary) software addition from the foundation - is it really a fairly simple technical implementation, brion? others? cheers, Peter, PM.

*An article such as Pearl necklace (sexuality) adds little to a girl's knowledge base in comparison to the barrier it raises to her use of the encyclopedia. * I assume her family cautioned her against using the internet entirely, then? FMF On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Fred Bauder &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt; wrote:

Wikipedia is censored with respect to a myriad of different sorts of content. In fact it is routinely censored, consider articles for deletion, just for a start then move on to recipes, dictionary definitions, fiction, to say nothing of point of view editing. However, I think the most productive approach is to create specialized versions tailored for audiences which need information such as schools and Muslim cultures. Fred Bauder

2009/5/14 Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt;om>: Yes. Editing is censoring, therefore there is no such separate thing as censoring, therefore the decision to put a picture on [[Autofellatio]] (WARNING: contains photograph) is an editorial decision. Which it in fact was. - d.

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 2:56 PM, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Or for enwiki to stop thinking themselves such fantastic editors and accept the notion that not all material is suitable for all ages. A simple "this image may be inappropriate (show/show all from now on)" button would go a long way and would be ridiculously easy to implement. The hard part is convincing enwiki that they're not always right. -Chad

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Thomas Dalton &lt;thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: And? What's wrong with pleasing the parents? I would rather do that and have children be able to access all the good content Wikipedia has than have their parents just make Wikipedia off-limits because of a small subset of the overall content. Is it? Blanket-labeling all images depicting nudity as "inappropriate" would be pretty straightforward and would alleviate the majority of concerns. -Chad

Fred is conflating guidelines on style with guidelines on content. Articles about food items are not banned. Articles about fiction are not banned. Fred is advocating banning a *class of articles.* On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 2:45 PM, Fred Bauder &lt;fredbaud(a)fairpoint.net&gt; wrote:

This one's been discussed ad nauseam already, and I think the community's discussions pretty unambiguously tend towards keep. FMF On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 2:18 AM, Andre Engels &lt;andreengels(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 5:16 PM, private musings &lt;thepmaccount(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: I recall hearing this very argument several years ago when wikipedia was some orders of magnitude smaller of course the empiric evidence shows otherwise, wikipedia grew beyond anyone's predictions in spite the "if you don't do X, things we downhill", "ikipedia will lose all reputatin", "wikipedia will be harmed", "wikipedia will become useless" where X ranges could e "censor nudity", "change the sysop election system" or "stop anon edits", "delete pokemon" or whatever the unsourmountable-obstacle-of-the-week is.

On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 6:06 PM, private musings &lt;thepmaccount(a)gmail.com&gt;wrote;wrote: No, it doesn't meanthat. It means, if you're going to play the "the future of wikipedia is at stake" then you better backup your hand with arguments and evidence

El 5/14/09 3:16 PM, private musings escribió: These are unrelated issues -- questionable sources and lack of subject consent apply just as much to non-nude and non-sexual images, and should be pursued regardless of any possible change to how we treat sexual images. -- brion

W dniu 15.05.2009 00:35, private musings pisze: yes if he cannot validate a licence delete it. What does it have to do with content of the picture? can you fix your quoting? I can't find my statement masti