The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement:
The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human
knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects
contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six
million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new
material continually being added.
The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the
projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to
some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural
sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the
sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is
illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the
grounds that it may offend.
Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend
to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that
already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially
offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or
informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no
such value.
--Michael Snow