[Foundation-l] Adult and Illegal content on Wikimedia projects

[Robert Scott Horning]

I'm trying to get the sense of the Wikimedia community here on a 
potentially explosive topic.

I started a thread on the Staff Lounge at Wikibooks over what to do with 
content that openly advocates breaking laws.  The goal I had was to help 
come up with some wording that we could add to existing policies that 
would prohibit this sort of content from being added to Wikibooks.

It has since devolved into general adult-level content including 
pornography and if it should or should not be permitted and what sorts 
of policies should be set for handling this sort of content.  Generally 
pornography is not a problem at all on Wikibooks, because it almost 
always involves a copyright violation or has other policy issues that 
come into play well before it becomes an issue over pornography.  The 
one exception was ordered to be deleted by Jimbo himself, and comes back 
to the above issue because it involved a display of what could arguably 
be child pornography.  That doesn't mean it won't be a problem in the 
future, but at the moment nobody seems to be trying to push the envelope 
here.

Where Wikibooks is having some real problems is with things like the 
Manual of Crime, How to Rape, AIM Password Cracking, or a currently 
contentious book on the use of illegal drugs called Drugs: Fact and 
Fiction.  There was one book that even advocated genocide, but that was 
defeated by a VfD.  The point I was trying to bring up is that these 
books should not have to go before the Wikibooks community if there is a 
clear policy that is strongly against this sort of practice.  As Jimbo 
pointed out in an earlier discussion, many of these books should simply 
be removed through a speedy deletion process with perhaps a concurring 
opinion by another user (i.e. administrator) before it goes.

My question to the Wikimedia community at large is to see how you have 
dealt with content of this nature, or if this is something that is 
restricted mainly to Wikibooks?  I've tried to use NPOV arguments to 
help temper some of the content, but many times it is simply better to 
remove the content entirely as the entire book is advocacy of this sort 
of activity, or to leave it in place with an obvious bias.  Sometimes 
the book is added by an anonymous contributor over a few days and then 
is a dead project, but in a few cases there are some very active 
contributors who are very passionate that the content and fight tooth 
and nail to keep the content in its current form and on Wikibooks, with 
even a community of contributors that are involved as well.  With enough 
other problems on Wikibooks, administrators have a tendancy to simply 
leave content like this alone under this situation and perhaps add it to 
their watch list as something to take care of in the future.

One proposal was to simply "wall off" the mature content in such a way 
that no links would go into or out of the mature content area, and 
become in effect a project within a project.  I don't know how to 
effectively do this, but in theory it might be possible.  Policing that 
content for vandalism is going to be a nightmare, and I can see other 
problems as well including administrators openly encouraging vandalism 
on this sub-set of pages.  The more I think about it, the more I dislike 
the idea, but it at least is a partial solution to the issue.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning