[WikiEN-l] External links to image boards with images of a child engaged in sexually explicit acts.

[Jimmy Wales]

Sean Barrett wrote:
> Sydney Poore stated for the record:
>>> Instead of a single image that can be presented in a context to make it 
>>> clear it is educational , a bigger concern is external links to image 
>>> boards with images of a child engaged in sexually explicit act.  These 
>>> appear on Wikipedia on a regular basis. When I went  to image board web 
>>> sites to look for inappropriate images, I felt disgusted that another 
>>> Wikipedia editor would put it on Wikipedia. I think we need to modify 
>>> our policy/guidelines dealing with images with children engaged in 
>>> sexually explicit acts. They should not be permitted in my opinion. 
>>> Editors that repeatedly add them should be blocked for being disruptive.
> 
> Certain sites stand out as excellent starting points for such a policy.
>  The worst offender is something called "Google," which has innumerable
> links to inappropriate material.

I am not fully persuaded by this argument.  I think that editorially
speaking we can and should make sensible judgments, even difficult
judgments, about the usefulness and appropriateness of various links to
our end users.

I do think, though, that we have had much less of a problem with
inappropriate external links (of various kinds) than we have had with
inappropriate images (of various kinds).  To move this out of the realm
of a discussion of pedophilia and 'censorship', let's consider a much
simpler case of fair use images that are on the site when free
alternatives would be easy to come by.

If I put an irrelevant bit of text into an article, including a link, a
bit which is problematic on any sort of grounds at all, then anyone can
come along and delete or change it.  It takes *one person* to eliminate
the problem, though of course an edit war or a long discussion might follow.

With images, though, there has grown this bizarre culture that we must
not delete anything until we have a consensus to do so.  This is partly
because images can't be easily restored, and there is some legitimacy to
that as a factor in how we do things, but I think it has gotten much
worse.  Wildly inappropriate images which do not even have a majority
support for keeping are kept in articles in a way that similarly
inappropriate text would be shot on sight.

--Jimbo