[Foundation-l] Censorship: Speedy deletion of porn articles

[Fred Bauder]

Each Wikipedia is autonomous. So long as they fall within the very broad Wikipedia policies which apply to all language versions, they are free to conduct the matters you are discussing as they see fit. As to censorship, the English Wikipedia also regularly deletes objectionable material, but applies a different standard. We also ban users, but are much more careful. As a consequence we have some very nasty material that has been impossible to get rid of, and sometimes let users disrupt the site for months before we finally come to a decision to ban them.

We have to deal with thousands of people; thus there is no way to simply grok what needs to be done and do it. A smaller, more cohesive community may feel able to proceed in a more intuitive way, but as noted, mistakes can be make.

Fred

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Yonatan Horan [mailto:yonatanh at gmail.com]
>Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2007 01:32 PM
>To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
>Subject: [Foundation-l] Censorship: Speedy deletion of porn articles
>
>Hi,
>
>It has recently (about two months ago) come to my attention that articles on
>the Hebrew Wikipedia are speedy deleted. I translated the Jenna Jameson
>article from the English Wikipedia and it was very quickly speedy deleted
>and I was indefinitely blocked due to being a sockpuppet of some guy (of
>course no checkuser request was done). By the way, I don't particularly like
>porn articles or anything of the sort; in fact, I don't believe I've ever
>edited a porn article on the enwp which I'm very active on. After a few days
>(during which I complained on Danny's enwp talk page and thus got the
>attention of a Hebrew Wikipedia admin and later spoke on the phone with
>another admin from hewp) I was unblocked. I'm guessing there have probably
>been other people who just gave up after they were banned and didn't return.
>
>The situation is basically that if a user who isn't well-known on the hewp
>(someone outside of a group of about 100 users) creates such an article he
>will probably be perm-banned and if anyone else does so, the article will
>probably just be speedy deleted. No rule has been passed on the Hebrew
>Wikipedia regarding this and even if it had been passed, it would be in
>violation of WMF (?) guidelines as Wikipedia is not censored. Some claim
>that a rule has been passed but many admins disagree with this. The "vote"
>was passed about two years ago and had 10-20 participants. In addition to
>this, the vote came at a time when the Hebrew Wikipedia was repeatedly
>vandalized by a certain user and many of the voters supposedly for the
>banning of porn articles referred only to this specific case (this is
>supported by their comments on the page).
>
>By the way, just so nobody corrects me, on the Hebrew Wikipedia *there are
>votes* since consensus is hardly ever reached and the total needed to pass a
>vote is a ridiculous 55%. Anyway, despite all the above, a few admins have
>said that they will speedy delete any porn articles created on the Hebrew
>Wikipedia. Currently there are a few porn articles which are about the movie
>Deep Throat and two other articles that I don't recall at the moment. This
>is a foundation issue because the situation right now is effectively
>censorship of articles that some people feel do not have a place on the
>wikipedia. I know I will probably have those who disagree with me be
>notified of this discussion at some point at which point the slandering will
>begin and I will be called a "snitch" and possibly other more colorful terms
>so I ask ahead of time for this discussion to remain civil. Although I hate
>to burden Danny, who probably has a lot of more important things to do, he
>is the only one who speaks both Hebrew and English and could take care of
>this issue since he is obviously a person trusted by most. Anyway I think
>I've written more than enough on an issue that should be pretty
>straightforward, that is, that wikipedia is not censored.
>
>Thanks,
>Yonatan
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