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

[Robert Scott Horning]

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Robert Scott Horning wrote:
>  
>
>>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.
>>    
>>
>
>Can you give a link?
>
>First of all, Wikibooks is for *textbooks*, broadly construed, not for
>any sort of nonsense people might think would be a cool nonfiction book.
>
>Second of all, Wikibooks is bound by the non-negotiable NPOV policy,
>which means that it should not be advocating breaking the law (nor
>advocating obeying the law, nor advocating anything at all really).
>  
>
Some links to discussion pages talking about this topic include:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks%3AStaff_lounge#Policy_about_books_dealing_with_illegal_activity 
(the current discussion)

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_talk:Policy/Vote/Archive_1#A_directly_enumerated_WikiBooks_policy 
(older discussion that covers many of these topics)

The problem with invoking NPOV as ground for deletion of a whole 
Wikibook is that it has been strongly discouraged by many of the 
contributors to Wikibooks in the past.  They percieve that most NPOV 
issues can be resolved by merely editing the content to fix it up so 
that it doesn't have a point of view.  The other issue is that even 
trying to decide if something violates NPOV standards is very subjective 
and prone to abuse by administrators who claim that any percieved point 
of view that is different from their own is grounds for removing the 
content.  When I tried to add a statement in the NPOV warning template 
that content violating this policy might result in its deletion if it 
isn't cleaned up, I was pounded on by many editors and told under no 
certain terms that the wording was unacceptable and that it should never 
be grounds for deletion by itself.  I gave up on that point and have 
moved on.

>>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.
>>    
>>
>
>The first 3 should be deleted on sight as blatant trolling and the
>contributor warned and then banned if they keep it up.
>
>The third one should be carefully policed for POV, and should ALSO be
>rewritten and probably retitled to be a *textbook*.
>  
>
I guess I've deleted so much stuff from Wikibooks lately that I'm 
getting very gunshy about trying to remove anything else, for fear that 
I'm going to get desysoped because I've steped on too many of the wrong 
toes.  Over the past month, the number of "good" modules listed on the 
statistics page for en.wikibooks has gone down by about 500 modules, 
with the total number of pages dropping by close to 2000 pages or more. 
 All of this in spite of continued activity and a growing community, 
with new pages being created all of the time.  The deletion log should 
show it all over how much activity has been done by administrators on 
Wikibooks, and it hasn't been just one admin.  These are just the easy 
cases where there are clear policies in place and cruft that has been 
left on Wikibooks for sometimes as much as the last three years with no 
previous attempt to remove it.  The last vestigages of the multi-lingual 
wikipedia textbook project (http://textbooks.wikipedia.org/) have 
finally been removed just this past month, as an example.

If I can't find a clear policy to remove the content, I either throw it 
up for a VfD or ignore it and move on to the next module for review, 
even if I think it might be questionable.  As you mention below, if 
something has been transwikied from Wikipedia I'm even more reluctant to 
delete the content, if for nothing else than I'll get a bunch of 
complaints about its removal after a nasty CSD discussion on Wikipedia. 
 It does get some crackpots to come to Wikibooks, and I've tried to warn 
admins on Wikipedia to first check if the content belongs on Wikibooks 
before they do a transwiki.

>>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?  
>>    
>>
>
>One problem is that the wikibooks community is small and is often
>overwhelmed by the larger Wikipedia community telling people to get
>their nonsense off wikipedia, and sending them to Wikibooks.  :)
>
>  
>
-- 
Robert Scott Horning