[Gendergap] Hardcore images essay - HELP!

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Wed, 16/2/11, ChaoticFluffy <chaoticfluffy at gmail.com> wrote:

From: ChaoticFluffy <chaoticfluffy at gmail.com>

 

> Joseph and
Andreas, I think you're assuming facts not in evidence here, so to

> speak. If you
disapprove of porn or the pornmaking process, that's got nothing

> to do with
wikipedia.

 

Whether a woman in Budapest derives sexual
pleasure from receiving five facials a week from ten men for $200 a go, as some
Wikipedians appear to believe, is not actually the issue here. The issue is this:

 

Wikipedia’s mission
is to reflect coverage in reliable sources. We have basic policy

commitments to that
effect – WP:V, WP:NOR, WP:NPOV. When it comes to sexual

or otherwise
controversial images, we should be featuring the same types of

illustrations that
reliable sources writing about these matters use. We should be

neither more liberal
nor less liberal than topical sources are, on balance.

 

What happens in
Wikipedia is that editors argue that we are bound to reliable sources

in text, but not in
illustrations. As far as illustrations are concerned, NOTCENSORED

applies. NOTCENSORED
is touted as the community’s right to substitute its own

editorial judgment in
matters of illustration for the editorial judgments made by reliable

sources. Our
demographics are skewed. The typical Wikipedian is an 18-year-old,

single childless
male. As far as we can tell, women make up about 1/8 of our editorship.

Compounding matters,
women comment very rarely at discussions concerned with

curating sexology
articles. (Three cheers for Carol!)

 

There is no support
in basic policy for the position that Wikipedia should knowingly,

wilfully and
systematically depart from the standards espoused by reliable sources

when it comes to
sexually explicit images. Yet this is what happens. We don’t do

this in our articles
on dinosaurs, say. Our illustrations of dinosaurs look just like

the illustrations of
dinosaurs in reliable sources.

 

This is just a gap
that has opened up in our policy fabric. As a result, we are at times

more explicit,
gratuitous or inept in our use of sexual or pornographic images in

Wikipedia than
reliable sources would choose to be, as in the examples discussed

(and, in part, since
addressed on-wiki).

 

Remember that these
articles are some of our most frequently accessed. Both the

Creampie article and
the Bukkake article e.g. are ranked among our top articles by page

views (ranks 1,300
and 2,000 or thereabouts). They are viewed significantly more often

than Hilary Clinton’s
biography, say.

 

Frequently viewed
articles like that are calling cards. They tell readers and potential

new contributors what
we are about.

 

What we should be
about is what reliable sources are about. This is not about protecting

women; it is about
protecting Wikipedia from becoming something else than an

educational resource.
Women do however have a key role in that, and the gender

gap is intimately
related to this issue. What sets reliable sources apart from porn sites

is that reliable
sources are written for a mixed readership, just like Wikipedia should be.

Reliable sources –
newspapers and scholarly writing – take women’s views into

account. Our
editorial process does a poor job of doing that, and the general gender gap

as well as the even
more extreme gender gap in curating these articles compounds the

issue.

 

One thing we could do
to address this, beyond increased female participation, is to

enshrine in policy
the principle that editorial standards for article illustration should not

depart significantly
and systematically from editorial standards in reliable sources.

That would help
address the problem.

 

Andreas

 

 


      
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