[Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery

[Brion Vibber]

El 5/14/09 7:31 PM, Thomas Dalton escribió:
> 2009/5/14 Robert Rohde<rarohde at gmail.com>:
>> On Thu, May 14, 2009 at 7:13 AM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> 2009/5/14 Fred Bauder<fredbaud at fairpoint.net>:
>>>> 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.
>>> 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.
>> 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.
>
> That would good. We can't choose what should and should not be seen by
> our readers without violating neutrality but there is nothing stopping
> them choosing for themselves.

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