FORUM WARNING [2] Division by zero (Line: 2933 of /srcsgcaop/boardclass.php) FORUM WARNING [2] Division by zero (Line: 2943 of /srcsgcaop/boardclass.php) Wikipedia Distributing Child Porn, Co-Founder Tells FBI - FOXNews -
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We have MSM pay dirt, with Moeller's greasy smile and pro-pedophile quote predominately featured.
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QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:20am)
An unsurprisingly bad report from Fox News there, full of contradictions and inaccuracies.
[citation needed] There are minor inaccuracies (spelling errors, and the like) but I didn't see any glaring errors. Please point out the "contradictions and inaccuracies".
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QUOTE(WMF)
The story repeats serious falsehoods and offers information taken grossly out of context, resulting in what amounts to a deliberate misrepresentation of reality.
I suppose the same could be said about many of the BLPs found on Wikipedia (including several I personally worked to correct).
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QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Wed 28th April 2010, 2:54pm)
QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:20am)
An unsurprisingly bad report from Fox News there, full of contradictions and inaccuracies.
[citation needed] There are minor inaccuracies (spelling errors, and the like) but I didn't see any glaring errors. Please point out the "contradictions and inaccuracies".
E.g. "The parent company of Wikipedia is knowingly distributing child pornography" then "Wikimedia has quite a bit of pornography on it and they had no idea." How can they "knowingly distribute" something they have no idea they have?
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Erik Moeller has posted a lengthy response on his personal blog, which is curiously entitled, Intelligent Designs.
I suppose when it comes to feeling defamed, Erik can anticipate some empathy from those who similarly felt defamed by their scandalous treatment at the hands of ethically challenged Wikipedians.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:12am)
Erik Moeller has posted a lengthy response on his personal blog, which is curiously entitled, Intelligent Designs.
I suppose when it comes to feeling defamed, Erik can anticipate some empathy from those who similarly felt defamed by their scandalous treatment at the hands of ethically challenged Wikipedians.
Moeller is distancing himself from his earlier statements and spinning them to be more acceptable to normal society. He now says that he only meant to not condemn near-same-age statutory rape type of sex between young adults and their almost adult sexual partners. It is a good sign that he is running from his past unacceptable statements. Yet he still uses weasel words. He is now against "sexual violence against children" which leaves one to wonder if he is only talking about adult/child sex with additional use of violence or the adult/child sex as being a form violence itself.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 28th April 2010, 4:22pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:12am)
Erik Moeller has posted a lengthy response on his personal blog, which is curiously entitled, Intelligent Designs.
I suppose when it comes to feeling defamed, Erik can anticipate some empathy from those who similarly felt defamed by their scandalous treatment at the hands of ethically challenged Wikipedians.
Moeller is distancing himself from his earlier statements and spinning them to be more acceptable to normal society. He now says that he only meant to not condemn near-same-age statutory rape type of sex between young adults and their almost adult sexual partners. It is a good sign that he is running from his past unacceptable statements. Yet he still uses weasel words. He is now against "sexual violence against children" which leaves one to wonder if he is only talking about adult/child sex with additional use of violence or the adult/child sex as being a form violence itself.
Yes, directly pointing to his "misrepresented response" is not particularly wise, because he does present a number of ideas which are, shall we say, challenging, including the idea that it is fine for pre-teens to have sex and that he can see no problem with that.
Actually, I notice that we have, even in 2001, evidence of an emergent Wikipedian mindset:
QUOTE
If you are irritated by the length of this comment, please read only the parts that interest you.
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QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Wed 28th April 2010, 4:58pm)
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 28th April 2010, 4:22pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:12am)
Erik Moeller has posted a lengthy response on his personal blog, which is curiously entitled, Intelligent Designs.
I suppose when it comes to feeling defamed, Erik can anticipate some empathy from those who similarly felt defamed by their scandalous treatment at the hands of ethically challenged Wikipedians.
Moeller is distancing himself from his earlier statements and spinning them to be more acceptable to normal society. He now says that he only meant to not condemn near-same-age statutory rape type of sex between young adults and their almost adult sexual partners. It is a good sign that he is running from his past unacceptable statements. Yet he still uses weasel words. He is now against "sexual violence against children" which leaves one to wonder if he is only talking about adult/child sex with additional use of violence or the adult/child sex as being a form violence itself.
Yes, directly pointing to his "misrepresented response" is not particularly wise, because he does present a number of ideas which are, shall we say, challenging, including the idea that it is fine for pre-teens to have sex and that he can see no problem with that.
Actually, I notice that we have, even in 2001, evidence of an emergent Wikipedian mindset:
QUOTE
If you are irritated by the length of this comment, please read only the parts that interest you.
Do we have a link to the original piece he wrote. Is he claiming that it was doctored or altered in some way? Was it doctored or altered in some way? I am confused.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Wed 28th April 2010, 5:11pm)
Do we have a link to the original piece he wrote. Is he claiming that it was doctored or altered in some way? Was it doctored or altered in some way? I am confused.
I don't believe he is claiming that there is any issue with the original articles' form, just that other people have misrepresented what they say. Again, this is WikiWorld, so why should that be a surprise?
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QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Wed 28th April 2010, 5:24pm)
QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Wed 28th April 2010, 5:11pm)
Do we have a link to the original piece he wrote. Is he claiming that it was doctored or altered in some way? Was it doctored or altered in some way? I am confused.
I don't believe he is claiming that there is any issue with the original articles' form, just that other people have misrepresented what they say. Again, this is WikiWorld, so why should that be a surprise?
The main theme of the article and the response is that sexual between young children (but not between adults and young children) is OK. Is that the gist?
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Wed 28th April 2010, 10:11am)
Do we have a link to the original piece he wrote. Is he claiming that it was doctored or altered in some way? Was it doctored or altered in some way? I am confused.
That's interesting. I think Moeller is being too clever by half here. He refers to Defending the Right to Pleasure. When I went to this article on Kur5hin and started to read it this morning my first though was "well that not as bad as I remember it." But then I dug a little further. This article is more moderate than Erik's Pleasure, Affection, Cause and Effect which has a similar title and is also on Kur5shin. The latter is certainly not about near same age adolescents having sex with each other. In fact Erik goes out of his way to make clear he is referring "not only to adolescents" but younger children too. It contains the knock out punch statement by Erik:
QUOTE
What is my position on pedophilia, then? It’s really simple. If the child doesn’t want it, is neutral or ambiguous, it’s inappropriate.
Clearly putting him outside the camp or those who ought to administer a project that facilitates collaboration between adults and children..
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It seems like the WMF, if this doesn't disappear naturally, will have to cut off Mr Moeller to save from a PR Snafu. It wouldn't be too big of a loss, as everyone on staff can be replaced without too much of a problem.
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QUOTE(Ottava @ Wed 28th April 2010, 5:36pm)
It seems like the WMF, if this doesn't disappear naturally, will have to cut off Mr Moeller to save from a PR Snafu. It wouldn't be too big of a loss, as everyone on staff can be replaced without too much of a problem.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 5:39pm)
QUOTE(Ottava @ Wed 28th April 2010, 5:36pm)
It seems like the WMF, if this doesn't disappear naturally, will have to cut off Mr Moeller to save from a PR Snafu. It wouldn't be too big of a loss, as everyone on staff can be replaced without too much of a problem.
What does Moeller do anyway?
I believe his most important role is spending lots of money to delay the implementation of flagged revisions.
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QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 4:39pm)
What does Moeller do anyway?
In his own words: "As Deputy Director, I represent the Executive Director, Sue Gardner, in her absence or on delegated projects, and oversee the development of Wikimedia’s product strategy – that is: how does the Wikimedia Foundation use technology to serve its mission, to bring free knowledge to every person on the planet."
I presume he gets somewhat less that the US$175,050 that Gardner makes.
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To read their statement you would think that Wikipedians organize themselves into diligent patrols to censor inappropriate material and not perform "Skull Dances" when they succeed in thwarting the demands of a anti-porn advocacy organization that requested the removal of offending material.
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I have to say I was a little shocked to discover this, but apparently they've come up with some kind of Electronic Series Of Tubes (ESOT) that prevents unwanted content from appearing on their, how U say, “Weblog†— maybe Wikipedia could get itself an ESOT, too?
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I have to say I was a little shocked to discover this, but apparently they've come up with some kind of Electronic Series Of Tubes (ESOT) that prevents unwanted content from appearing on their, how U say, “Weblog†— maybe Wikipedia could get itself an ESOT, too?
I suppose you could always try Erik's Blog to comment. The range of free expression their runs from We Wub You Erik all the way through We Wub You Erik Very Very Much I'm sure Mr. Information-Wants-to-Be-Free welcomes your views.
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Some of the comments on Fox's site are really over the top. Over the months on WR moderator, staff and the best contributors have worked to make clear that Moeller advocacy does not make him himself a pedophile. We have also worked to keep the subject free from conflating pedophilia with homosexuality and avoid the resulting homophobia and gay bashing. Still the case was made that a person engaging in such advocacy is not appropriate for service in a position of administrative responsibility in an organization that facilitates collaboration between adults and children. It was also argued that his views represented a deeply ingrained extreme libertarianism that was a major barrier preventing WMF from instituting any effective measures to assure child protection.
Having repeatedly made these arguments and having been ignored the issue has now made its way into the mainstream media in the form of Fox News coverage. It arrives to be greeted by Fox's constituency with many of their worst aspects, including homophobia, fully intact. While this makes me uncomfortable I still am grateful to Fox for the coverage. This coverage might have been missed altogether by more liberal media who are enchanted with technology and possess a shoot from the hip free speech orientation without taking a harder look.
For all of Fox News outrage they still have not completely grasped the most outrageous aspect of this scandal. They proceed as if this where a dispute about content only. They completely underestimate or lack any understanding of the nature of Wikipedia. This is not only a matter of protecting children not from the fleeting harm of viewing the offending material. It is also a matter of protecting children from the very real danger presented by the unsupervised collaboration of child and adults in the absence of any rigorous child protection measures. A twelve year old child receives more protection from a web site that promotes his/her breakfast cereal than from a Wikipedia that asks his/her participation in a sustained collaborative project engaging both adults and children. I don't suppose the comments will become much more rational once this threat is understood.
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QUOTE
"Be brave, be strong, our time will come... Be proud to be a boy lover!" -- actual outgoing message on answering machine at NAMBLA headquarters
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"Stay strong and know that there are many, many people who support you." -- actual comment left by Barry Newstead of WMF consulting firm, Bridgespan Group
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:59pm)
QUOTE
"Be brave, be strong, our time will come... Be proud to be a boy lover!" -- actual outgoing message on answering machine at NAMBLA headquarters
QUOTE
"Stay strong and know that there are many, many people who support you." -- actual comment left by Barry Newstead of WMF consulting firm, Bridgespan Group
QUOTE
"Be brave and then be strong Be brave, you'll not be wrong if you are right Keep your chin up tight and be brave and then be strong.
Be brave and then be strong. Be brave you'll not go wrong with fighting might You will reach the site so be brave and be strong. " --- Mr. Rogers
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QUOTE(Ottava @ Wed 28th April 2010, 2:43pm)
More blog responses about the situation. I guess Fox News has the ability to give stories legs.
Apparently when Wikipedians post child pornography Mr. Walsh considers them to be mere users of an interactive computer service, while if any Wikipedians feels inclined to overcome the inertia of a laissez-faire libertarian environment of Wikipedia and remove such images they are "volunteers" who act with the blessing of WMF, at least this week. I don't remember him saying so during the Virgin Killer incident. Then the people defending the child pornography were "volunteer spoke-persons." Walsh's concept of respondeat superior is flexible and convenient. I wonder if his rate of compensation as a spokesperson varies depending on which side of his mouth is speaking.
I have to say I was a little shocked to discover this, but apparently they've come up with some kind of Electronic Series Of Tubes (ESOT) that prevents unwanted content from appearing on their, how U say, “Weblog†— maybe Wikipedia could get itself an ESOT, too?
Mr. Information-wants-to-be-free is probably wishing wewy wewy hard that certain information about his past opinions, now that he has a good day-job, would remain hidden in the net's nooks and crannies, never be found. Alas, this is not the way the net works.
Rectal exam time, Mr. Moeller. And I can't think of a more appropriate patient.
Here's a blog with all kinds of Moeller edits AND a link to his defense of non-violent child-porn:
This cite was given by Sanger in his letter to the FBI and cc: to WMF. From which we find that Councillor Godwin actually does do something during the day. Godwin hinted darkly that Sanger saying that Moeller was "well-known for his defense of pedophilia" was perhaps actionable. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) Erm, I suppose WP:NLT doesn't apply to Godwin, even when published in the WP:SIGNPOST. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif) That would be asking too much. But here's Godwin's full response. Given that Moeller has explicitly defended child porn as being harmess, I'm not sure that it is actionable if somebody says that he's well known for defending pedophilia. He's more well-known all the time (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) . And the rest is splitting a mighty fine hair-- since who else but a pedophile would be interested in child porn?? (Not me, Mr. Godwin (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif) )
Here's a Godwin quote which only Godwin could explain:
QUOTE(Godwin)
Returning to "community standards", Godwin stated: "There is no evidence in Sanger's message that the community has failed in its efforts to make sure that the content of Wikimedia Commons is legal, at least in the context of the law applicable to Wikimedia Foundation as a hosting provider".
The question of who the community is, in this situation, has not been defined. Godwin doesn't help. From here, it looks like Godwin is going to argue that it's anybody BUT whoever anybody else thinks the community is, is the community. The "community" is undefinable.
In any case, he says CDA 230 protects WMF as long as they don't originate the material. And he's probably right, although CDA 230 is going to groan and snap eventually, as we alll know.
As for Moeller, he's #2 man at WMF on their org chart. Aren't these public background-checks a bitch? Especially when they get to FOX news. Heck, don't you wish you could just block and ban FOX? Alas, WP doesn't control TV or Google. They simply help them in their destructiveness. Usually with no harm to themselves. But what goes around, does tend to come around.
I have a "if the glove don't fit you must acquit" slogan for WMF: "The interNET does not forGET." WP has an oversight memory hole. Don't let it influence your view of the rest of the world.
All this surely isn't going into any BLP of Moeller on WP any time soon (maybe right after they finish the Doran one-- what do you think?) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 28th April 2010, 2:12pm)
Erik Moeller has posted a lengthy response on his personal blog, which is curiously entitled, Intelligent Designs.
QUOTE
I was able to confirm that the email was sent to multiple bloggers; the only recipient who ran with it was Owen Thomas. His series of posts is almost entirely based on the original email (and probably some additional correspondence with its author).
So the Valleywag article was "almost entirely based" on the work of "another information content provider". Ha, I hope they assert a section 230 defense (in addition to all the others).
I observe that the Wikimedia Foundation is capable of exercising prior moderation when it comes to information content it really cares about, for instance, criticisms posted on this blog. Perhaps they can now see the wisdom of exercising due care with content that gets posted on Wikipedia.
There appears to be some sort of obstruction in their ESOT.
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I observe that the Wikimedia Foundation is capable of exercising prior moderation when it comes to information content it really cares about, for instance, criticisms posted on this blog. Perhaps they can now see the wisdom of exercising due care with content that gets posted on Wikipedia.
There appears to be some sort of obstruction in their ESOT.
Funny, two new posts got through, both urging suing someone (unclear just who.) This from the land of NLT. I guess they can't take it but still get to dish it out. The hypocrisy is layered and elegantly textured.
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QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:49pm)
...two new posts got through, both urging suing someone (unclear just who.)
Seems to me they want Erik "User:Eloquence" Moeller to sue Fox News. In principle I'd say yeah, sure, anybody who sues Fox News is doing a good thing, even if they have no case and are more likely to end up "Plaxicoing" themselves in the process. However, I'd be unsporting if I didn't at least point out that Fox News probably has a little bit more money in their legal-defense budget than Erik Moeller has.
I'm naturally assuming, of course, that the WMF won't lift a finger, dollar-wise, to assist Mr. Moeller in suing anybody - even if it is Fox News.
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QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 9:07am)
E.g. "The parent company of Wikipedia is knowingly distributing child pornography" then "Wikimedia has quite a bit of pornography on it and they had no idea." How can they "knowingly distribute" something they have no idea they have?
I noticed that too, of course... It's weird, actually. In paragraph 2 they say, "Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, said Wikimedia Commons, the parent company of Wiki products including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews and Wikiquote..." which implies that they don't even know what Commons is, much less the actual nature of the interrelationship between the various WMF-owned domains.
And yet, a few paragraphs later, there's this:
QUOTE
"I wasn’t shocked that it was online, but I was shocked that it was on a Wikimedia Foundation site that purports to be a reference site," said Sanger... (snip) ... (Wikimedia Commons is owned and hosted by the California-based Wikimedia Foundation.)
...Which implies that maybe they do at least know that Commons isn't a "company," much less the "parent company of Wikipedia." Maybe they shouldn't be taken to task so much for not understanding the domain interrelationships, which are somewhat confusing for most people (and bearing in mind that Fox News doesn't really do journalism in the traditional sense, more like advocacy and propaganda).
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FoxNews.com also just (?) added a note to the end of the piece linking to Mr. Moeller's defense of his past statements on the subject of pedophilia.
QUOTE(FoxNews.com)
-- Following publication of this article, Wikimedia Foundation posted an online response that reads in part:
"The Wikimedia Foundation obeys the law. In the weeks since Sanger’s published allegations, the Wikimedia Foundation has not been contacted by the FBI or any other law-enforcement agency with regard to allegedly illegal content on any Wikimedia projects. Our community of volunteer editors takes action to remove illegal material when such material is brought to its attention. The Wikimedia Foundation is proud of the Wikimedia editors who zealously work to keep the projects free of illegal material. If and when we are informed by law enforcement agencies of illegal content that has not already been removed through self-policing, we will take quick action to delete it."
This is a fine response, except that the community of volunteer editors does not take action to remove illegal material when such material is brought to its attention; rather, it argues over whether or not the laws are wrong, and often concludes that they are. More importantly, the statement (naturally) makes no mention of the fact that WMF-funded sites have the technology to prevent such material from being posted in the first place, and have essentially refused to implement it.
QUOTE
-- Erik Moeller also posted a response that reads in part:
"I want to say definitively: I do not defend nor support acts of sexual violence against children and have never defended pedophilia in any way.
"I have consistently defended the right of children of comparable age to engage in consensual, harmless sexual interactions with each other – what’s commonly called "playing doctor", and also safe sex among teens. I have never defended the "right" of pedophiles to abuse children; child sexual abuse is a crime, and there is no such right. Children also don’t have the ability to consent to sexual activity with pedophiles, and such activities are sexual violence against children by definition."
Ah. So, "playing doctor," that's all it is, then! It's all consensual and harmless! Clean, wholesome family entertainment! Shee-it, why didn't he just say so all along? Think of the time we could have all saved, thinking that he meant... well, never mind that now.
By the way, does this mean Erik believes children do have the ability to consent to sexual activity, as long as it isn't with pedophiles?
QUOTE
In response to the content mentioned in Larry Sanger’s letter to the FBI, Moeller wrote:
"It’s a false claim related largely to some historic early 20th century drawings, as described in the summary published by the Wikipedia Signpost. The Wikimedia Foundation’s General Counsel examined the drawings and concluded that they do not violate federal laws; we have not received any communication from the FBI to the contrary, and when and if we are asked by authorities to remove images that are illegal, we will do so."
-- FoxNews.com has been informed that Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, sent a copy of Sanger's letter to the FBI on April 21, and Rep. Steve Austria, R-Ohio, sent a copy of the same letter to the FBI on April 27.
Legislative attention... that usually results in at least a case number, doesn't it? Maybe they should be less worried about being "contacted" by the FBI and more worried about being raided! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif)
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My God. And they haven't even got onto his edits on the bestiality article yet (some of the stranger edits my emphasis).
QUOTE
Zoophilia is defined as sexual attraction to non-human animals. Human/animal sexual interaction is referred to as bestiality, sodomy or simply animal sex. In the context of pornography, the term "farmsex" is also sometimes used.
Zoophilia is widely considered unnatural and human/animal sex has been condemned as animal abuse. Some advocates such as Peter Singer argue that this is not inherently the case. Sodomy is illegal in many jurisdictions, while in others, such as in Germany, mistreatment of animals in general is outlawed but bestiality is not specifically mentioned.
The extent to which human/animal sexual interaction occurs is controversial. Zoophilia advocates also claim that the human/animal relationship goes far beyond sexuality, and that they are capable of forming a loving relationship with an animal that can frequently last several years and that they do not consider functionally different from any other love/sex relationship.
Bestiality has been a frequent subject in art, literature, and fantasy. In Greek mythology, Zeus appeared to Leda in the form of a swan (resulting in the birth of Helen and Polydeuces), and the Minotaur was the offspring of Queen Pasiphae and a white bull. The God Pan has also been frequently associated with animal sex.
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Thu 29th April 2010, 9:25am)
My God. And they haven't even got onto his edits on the bestiality article yet (some of the stranger edits my emphasis).
QUOTE
Zoophilia is defined as sexual attraction to non-human animals. Human/animal sexual interaction is referred to as bestiality, sodomy or simply animal sex. In the context of pornography, the term "farmsex" is also sometimes used.
Zoophilia is widely considered unnatural and human/animal sex has been condemned as animal abuse. Some advocates such as Peter Singer argue that this is not inherently the case. Sodomy is illegal in many jurisdictions, while in others, such as in Germany, mistreatment of animals in general is outlawed but bestiality is not specifically mentioned.
The extent to which human/animal sexual interaction occurs is controversial. Zoophilia advocates also claim that the human/animal relationship goes far beyond sexuality, and that they are capable of forming a loving relationship with an animal that can frequently last several years and that they do not consider functionally different from any other love/sex relationship.
Bestiality has been a frequent subject in art, literature, and fantasy. In Greek mythology, Zeus appeared to Leda in the form of a swan (resulting in the birth of Helen and Polydeuces), and the Minotaur was the offspring of Queen Pasiphae and a white bull. The God Pan has also been frequently associated with animal sex.
Personally, I can't see an issue with those. He's not saying people are actually capable of forming stable (sic) relationships with animals; he's quite carefully worded it to say that they claim it. Since the psychopathology of "why on earth would anyone want to?" is such a fundamental point in all these sexual-deviancy topics, I don't see "this is how they justify it to themselves" equating to condoning it.
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QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Thu 29th April 2010, 6:45am)
Personally, I can't see an issue with those. He's not saying people are actually capable of forming stable (sic) relationships with animals; he's quite carefully worded it to say that they claim it. Since the psychopathology of "why on earth would anyone want to?" is such a fundamental point in all these sexual-deviancy topics, I don't see "this is how they justify it to themselves" equating to condoning it.
Did he link these claims to reliable sources, or was he just typing off the cuff as an expert on what bestiality proponents claim? How did he become such an expert? I thought he was like a computer programmer or something.
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QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Thu 29th April 2010, 11:45am)
Personally, I can't see an issue with those. He's not saying people are actually capable of forming stable (sic) relationships with animals; he's quite carefully worded it to say that they claim it. Since the psychopathology of "why on earth would anyone want to?" is such a fundamental point in all these sexual-deviancy topics, I don't see "this is how they justify it to themselves" equating to condoning it.
Zoophilia Pedophilia advocates also claim that the human/animal adult-child relationship goes far beyond sexuality, and that they are capable of forming a loving relationship with an animal a child that can frequently last several years and that they do not consider functionally different from any other love/sex relationship.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Thu 29th April 2010, 12:52pm)
QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Thu 29th April 2010, 11:45am)
Personally, I can't see an issue with those. He's not saying people are actually capable of forming stable (sic) relationships with animals; he's quite carefully worded it to say that they claim it. Since the psychopathology of "why on earth would anyone want to?" is such a fundamental point in all these sexual-deviancy topics, I don't see "this is how they justify it to themselves" equating to condoning it.
Zoophilia Pedophilia advocates also claim that the human/animal adult-child relationship goes far beyond sexuality, and that they are capable of forming a loving relationship with an animal a child that can frequently last several years and that they do not consider functionally different from any other love/sex relationship.
It is a very difficult area: in claiming to put forward a neutral point of view, Wikipedia style, you potentially put forward arguments that are not substantiated, but have the basis of "claim" - wisdom of the crowds.
90% of people will read that Captain Pugwash had a character Roger the Cabin Boy when there was never any such thing. However, the claim gets repeated so frequently that it has become very close to fact in most people's minds. Is it appropriate to repeat false claims in a factual article, or should it be sufficient to say "these are the facts" and leave people to work out for themselves that the false characters are not mentioned.
The problem is by constant presentation of a claim, you give the claim credence. So explaining the self-justification has the difficulty that in reporting it, Wikipedia is in danger of appearing to accept the justification.
Scientists claim global warming is a reality (and have research to prove it, though it is disputed). Bestialists claim that sticking willies up the bums of dogs is very satisfying for the animal (and have few bite marks to prove it).
Repeating a claim without analysis has the danger of implicitly endorsing that claim. Oh, and why did Teh Community accept the self-assigned neologism of zoophilia over bestiality - another implicit endorsement of the animal abuse community.
Re: “Our community of volunteer editors takes action to remove illegal material when such material is brought to its attention.â€
Perhaps there could be some sort of social-technical mechanism that allows your community of volunteer editors to remove clearly illegal material before it gets published.
I guess they prefer lagged revisions — well, except when it comes to something they really care about.
My comments, which are still awaiting ''moderation'' (which in the case means never):
QUOTE
â€The Wikimedia Foundation is proud of the Wikimedia editors who zealously work to keep the projects free of illegal material.†So the WMF takes pride in its zealots…well that is something it and Fair&Balanced FOX News seem to have in common. BTW, suing them is highly inadvisable…they have far deeper pockets (See also never get involved in a land war in Asia).
I observe that the Wikimedia Foundation is capable of exercising prior moderation when it comes to information content it really cares about, for instance, criticisms posted on this blog. Perhaps they can now see the wisdom of exercising due care with content that gets posted on Wikipedia.
There appears to be some sort of obstruction in their ESOT.
Maybe it should be the iPlunger. Afterall, did we not just see Apple making sure that i-SWAT knocked down the door of an iNerd who was webcasting bits about their new model iPhone lost by an Apple iEmployee at an iBar? The thing isn't due out on the market for 6 months.
Hey, Apple! If you beta test your products THAT well, how come nobody told you that you can't HEAR voices on the present iPhone due to its crappy speaker, and also that it seems to be hooked up to AT&T's 2-G network, which is entirely run out of a HAM antenna mounted on a tower on top a home-garage in Schenectady. Signals from which rarely reach as far as all the way out here to CALIFORNIA. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)
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QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Thu 29th April 2010, 2:23pm)
Oh, and why did Teh Community accept the self-assigned neologism of zoophilia over bestiality - another implicit endorsement of the animal abuse community.
"Zoophilia" = "feels attracted to animals", "Bestiality" = "actually having sex with animals", I'd say. I could imagine that a lot of people attracted to animals (or children, or car tailpipes, or their neighbor's garden hose) have enough self-control not actually to carry them out, and thus bestialists & child molesters are relatively small subsets of zoophiles/pedophiles.
I imagine a Poetsock will be along shortly to make the same point in more detail. (No, don't bother emailing me to explain how stealing identities from the staff of a Haringey tranny-parlor as part of a deranged fantasy is totally different.)
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Thu 29th April 2010, 8:08pm)
QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Thu 29th April 2010, 2:23pm)
Oh, and why did Teh Community accept the self-assigned neologism of zoophilia over bestiality - another implicit endorsement of the animal abuse community.
"Zoophilia" = "feels attracted to animals", "Bestiality" = "actually having sex with animals", I'd say. I could imagine that a lot of people attracted to animals (or children, or car tailpipes, or their neighbor's garden hose) have enough self-control not actually to carry them out, and thus bestialists & child molesters are relatively small subsets of zoophiles/pedophiles.
I imagine a Poetsock will be along shortly to make the same point in more detail. (No, don't bother emailing me to explain how stealing identities from the staff of a Haringey tranny-parlor as part of a deranged fantasy is totally different.)
The trouble with that is that when you are reasonable, others who are not reasonable seek to take advantage.
While I don't disagree with your definitions, the reality is that there are people who want to deliberately conflate the two groups with the purpose of confusing opinion and suggesting that having a sexual interest in animals or children is a right and proper thing, and therefore those who act on that interest are really being the honest ones (much as others want to conflate the two groups, perhaps because they do not believe that there is a significant difference between someone with an interest who has not yet acted on it and someone who has acted on it).
So, no harm in paedophiles liking children, a perfectly healthy and normal human response, actually no harm in them engaging in sexual acts with consenting children, a perfectly normal response, it is just the couple of guys who go too far giving the whole paedophile thing a bad name, but we know that there are bad people in every walk of life - which seems to be the Erik argument which he believes is a mature, educated position. My problem with that is that by suggesting that the principle is OK, you are actually validating those who believe that the action is OK.
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QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 28th April 2010, 9:49pm)
Funny, two new posts got through, both urging suing someone (unclear just who.) This from the land of NLT. I guess they can't take it but still get to dish it out. The hypocrisy is layered and elegantly textured.
I couldn't agree with you more, GBG.
That's why I had to take Erik Moeller's snout, swat it with a rolled-up newspaper, then rub his nose in his own hypocritical organization's repugnant practices regarding free speech that becomes unfree when it is based in criticism. Take a look at the most recent comment (#6) that passed muster with the WMF blog corps.
Sorry that I have to give you a WebCitation link above, but that comment will be disappearing pretty soon. I'll give it just a few more hours.
Let's see if anyone here can figure out why this comment will suddenly become unacceptable to the Wikipediot Horde:
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Thu 29th April 2010, 1:57pm)
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Wed 28th April 2010, 9:49pm)
Funny, two new posts got through, both urging suing someone (unclear just who.) This from the land of NLT. I guess they can't take it but still get to dish it out. The hypocrisy is layered and elegantly textured.
I couldn't agree with you more, GBG.
That's why I had to take Erik Moeller's snout, swat it with a rolled-up newspaper, then rub his nose in his own hypocritical organization's repugnant practices regarding free speech that becomes unfree when it is based in criticism. Take a look at the most recent comment (#6) that passed muster with the WMF blog corps.
Sorry that I have to give you a WebCitation link above, but that comment will be disappearing pretty soon. I'll give it just a few more hours.
Let's see if anyone here can figure out why this comment will suddenly become unacceptable to the Wikipediot Horde:
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Meanwhile MzMcBride's recent attempt to get some kind of policy (well not really policy but the kind of user generated stuff that passes as policy around WP) relating to pedophiles has degenerated into the usual trench warfare concerning "Discrimation" against their valued pedophiles. These extremist seem to be having a little more trouble than usual gaining any traction but Fox News could get some good insight into the mindset of Wikipedia by looking at this discussion. Without this it is hard for the public to understand why a top ten website would ever want to harbor pedophiles and child pornography.
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I'm embarrassed to say that I tried the Anagram Server on Roger Hogsky and came up empty-handed. Part of what threw me off was the fact that his name appeared elsewhere, a long time ago.
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Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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Ho hum, for all Erik's protestations, this could hardly have been a surprise that it would blow up one day; Mr Sanger has only really picked up on something that has been circling for a while, and combined two stories we have been kicking around for a long time - he just had the nerve to call in the FBI and make a story out of it. Erik didn't even have the sense to quietly expire the old blog entries, which says something about his lack of judgement, even if he does stand by his claim that he has been mis-interpreted.
I wonder what Sue (I pick her as I vaguely assume she was sane before she joined Wikipedia) really makes of it: we have dodgy porn site and InterWeb sex practitioner and also a public advocate of child sexual freedom representing WMF. As a member of the public, am I really going to have confidence that the WMF is properly constituted to take well-judged decisions on the proper management of Wikipedia? Of course, what makes it worse is that it is clear that there is a long track record of deliberately refusing to deal with the problem - Erik of course being instrumental in blocking flagged revisions; so they can't exactly claim they have not had time to resolve the problem,or are in any way unaware.
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QUOTE(Somey @ Thu 29th April 2010, 2:53am)
QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 9:07am)
E.g. "The parent company of Wikipedia is knowingly distributing child pornography" then "Wikimedia has quite a bit of pornography on it and they had no idea." How can they "knowingly distribute" something they have no idea they have?
I noticed that too, of course... It's weird, actually. In paragraph 2 they say, "Larry Sanger, who left Wikipedia in 2002, said Wikimedia Commons, the parent company of Wiki products including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews and Wikiquote..." which implies that they don't even know what Commons is, much less the actual nature of the interrelationship between the various WMF-owned domains.
And yet, a few paragraphs later, there's this:
QUOTE
"I wasn’t shocked that it was online, but I was shocked that it was on a Wikimedia Foundation site that purports to be a reference site," said Sanger... (snip) ... (Wikimedia Commons is owned and hosted by the California-based Wikimedia Foundation.)
...Which implies that maybe they do at least know that Commons isn't a "company," much less the "parent company of Wikipedia." Maybe they shouldn't be taken to task so much for not understanding the domain interrelationships, which are somewhat confusing for most people (and bearing in mind that Fox News doesn't really do journalism in the traditional sense, more like advocacy and propaganda).
The way I read the article, the reporter started with his own writing and then pretty much copied and pasted a lot of content from the 2008 Valleywag piece. A single author would undoubtedly catch something like this. It's when you have multiple "contributors" that this type of writing (I won't dare call it journalism) emerges.
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Fri 30th April 2010, 12:44pm)
As crude as Fox's commenting system might be Möller has them beat. He is opting for static content until it all blows over.
Huh, odd. The content is dynamic only in the sense that it's reading out of the database, but it should be able to be cached pretty easily. It's a good thing Erik doesn't work in the tech industry. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)
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QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 2:07pm)
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Wed 28th April 2010, 2:54pm)
QUOTE(Theanima @ Wed 28th April 2010, 8:20am)
An unsurprisingly bad report from Fox News there, full of contradictions and inaccuracies.
[citation needed] There are minor inaccuracies (spelling errors, and the like) but I didn't see any glaring errors. Please point out the "contradictions and inaccuracies".
E.g. "The parent company of Wikipedia is knowingly distributing child pornography" then "Wikimedia has quite a bit of pornography on it and they had no idea." How can they "knowingly distribute" something they have no idea they have?
The contradiction is in the statements made by Sanger, not in the reporting of those statements. Both statements were attributed to Sanger.
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10. How dare I suggest the law be enforced? I really think what has a lot of people hot and bothered is that I have had the outrageous gall to suggest that the law and common, reasonable societal standards be enforced against a site that has, for Wikipedia's many true believers, been a model of self-regulation. The very opposite has been the case. The notion that the government might be called in to make the Wikimedia Foundation and its community play by the (legal) rules goes completely against the idealistic, anarchistic Wikipedia spirit. To put it another way, the real world threatens to interrupt the whole insulated Wikipedia game, which is a sort of collective delusion. My failure to believe in the game, and my willingness to denounce its results publicly, is what really crosses the line for Wikipedia's true believers. (That, and the fact that I'm speaking nearly alone against a whole mass movement; this makes me especially easy to demonize.) But I think Wikipedia must become more consistent with the somewhat higher standards of the world it is a part of, and I would think of myself as lacking courage if I did not say so. I hope others will join me.
Welcome, Mr. Sanger, to a external critique of Wikipedia, the Libertarian Dystopia, and yes the internet libertarians don't like it one little bit.
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Meanwhile, JzG seems to be seeing the light, too. But, he's outnumbered now, thanks to the tolerant attitudes of his masters, and the fact that Guy Chapman's blocked half of the rational adults from participating in Wikimedia projects.
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Oh there it is. I was wondering where Internet Libertarians went to line up to kick and spit at Sanger.
BTW other than for the purpose of pointing in the direction of the child porn's location this Wikipedia vs Wikimedia Commons stuff is a non-starter. The only legal entity involved is Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) owner operator of both websites and of course the individual "contributors" who kicked in their porn.
An excellent and thoughtful piece by Sanger. Plus a link to a good article on 'True Believers' which is short enough to post here in full.
QUOTE
excerpts from THE TRUE BELIEVER: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (from a review by Dr. Mark Skousen at MSkousen.com ):
“All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.†(Preface)
Hoffer defines a “true believer†as “the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause.†Leaders of the mass movement “must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hopeâ€â€”for Islamic fanatics, death is the key to instant heaven. “If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose….†(p. 13)
The true believer is “without wonder and hesitation.†“An active mass movement rejects the present and centers its interest on the future.†(p. 82) The mass movement hates independence and individualism. The focus is on “obedience†and “one mindedness.†“Uniformity†must be developed. (p. 101) Members must be “deindividualized†and “incorporated†into the mass movement. “When we lose our individual independence in the incorporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom—freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse.†(p. 100)
Violence is essential to fanatical mass movements. “Violence breeds fanaticism….and fanaticism begets violence.†Regarding Islam: “Islam imposed its faith by force, yet the coerced Muslims displayed a devotion to the new faith more ardent than that of the first Arabs engaged in the movement.†(p. 107)
Members of the fanatic group are taught to have a common hatred, a single foe, a devil. “The ideal devil is a foreigner….Hitler—the foremost authority on devils—found it easy to brand the German Jews as foreigners.†(pp. 92-93) Hatred becomes a habit. (p. 146) Interestingly, Hoffer points out that “The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners….Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.†(p. 96) http://freedomkeys.com/truebeliever.htm
And what does Sanger (or do any of you) expect from this FBI investigation? Are you saying that Mike Godwin belongs in jail because of this? I mean, if Sanger's saying it's a "clear violation" of 18 USC 1466A, and he's claiming Godwin knows about it, then that's what he's saying. Godwin goes to jail, for not less than 5 years, for hosting highly offensive fictional cartoons.
I'm sorry, but that's a scary thought. I'm in full support of child porn laws. But this is not a child porn law, it's an obscenity law. And obscenity laws are effectively thoughtcrimes.
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While I don't expect anything from any government agency, what would make sense is for the IRS to revoke WMF's status as a charitable non-profit educational foundation (but not simply on the grounds that Sanger has drawn attention to).
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 3:09am)
An excellent and thoughtful piece by Sanger. Plus a link to a good article on 'True Believers' which is short enough to post here in full.
QUOTE
excerpts from THE TRUE BELIEVER: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer (from a review by Dr. Mark Skousen at MSkousen.com ):
“All mass movements generate ...
...Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.†(p. 96) http://freedomkeys.com/truebeliever.htm
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:17pm)
While I don't expect anything from any government agency, what would make sense is for the IRS to revoke WMF's status as a charitable non-profit educational foundation (but not simply on the grounds that Sanger has drawn attention to).
And what does Sanger (or do any of you) expect from this FBI investigation? Are you saying that Mike Godwin belongs in jail because of this? I mean, if Sanger's saying it's a "clear violation" of 18 USC 1466A, and he's claiming Godwin knows about it, then that's what he's saying. Godwin goes to jail, for not less than 5 years, for hosting highly offensive fictional cartoons.
I'm sorry, but that's a scary thought. I'm in full support of child porn laws. But this is not a child porn law, it's an obscenity law. And obscenity laws are effectively thoughtcrimes.
Why would Godwin be the one to go to jail?
What I would hope (in my best world of all possible worlds) would be that the FBI issue a "white paper" or other such advisory notice, recommending "best practices" for websites that publish content that some significant number of people may find offensive or obscene, if not expressly illegal. For example, the paper might say, "If your website serves up an old drawing of what appears to be a 12-year-old girl, her dolly dropped on the floor, giving a blow-job to a reclining man, it is advisable in the opinion of the FBI to place those sorts of images behind a captcha-based screen, where the would-be viewer must agree that they are over the age of 18, and that they realize and consent to the fact that the forthcoming image may be offensive or objectionable to many people."
Do I expect something so logical and helpful to actually emerge from the FBI? No.
Do I expect the Wikimedia Foundation to adopt proactively something so logical and helpful, regardless of legal obligation to do so? No.
Do I expect to hear Jimmy Wales at some point in 2010 lecturing to an audience or responding to an interview, that Wikimedia Foundation projects are laudable and worthy, in large part because of his belief that they serve and educate young children? Yes.
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QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 2:14pm)
I'm sorry, but that's a scary thought. I'm in full support of child porn laws. But this is not a child porn law, it's an obscenity law. And obscenity laws are effectively thoughtcrimes.
A thought experiment: imagine if some of the images on Wikipedia commons were shown on a bus advertisement. Would that be deemed acceptable or not? And if not, and if the law were brought to effect, would that be for thoughtcrime or something else?
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QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 9:20am)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:17pm)
While I don't expect anything from any government agency, what would make sense is for the IRS to revoke WMF's status as a charitable non-profit educational foundation (but not simply on the grounds that Sanger has drawn attention to).
My answers would be "maybe" (I haven't been convinced that the material is "obscene") and "no".
Meanwhile, why are we jumping to the most dramatic of possible conclusions?
Wouldn't it make more sense that, if the FBI finds the images to be in violation of 18 USC 1466A, that their guidance to the WMF would be to take the images down, or otherwise face prosecution? I don't think the FBI would play the sort of brinksmanship game where the first move is a raid on New Montgomery Street, and Sue Gardner and Michael Snow being led off in handcuffs. The first move would more likely be a warning of some sort. Then it would be the (predictable) response of the WMF to refuse to do anything about the smut.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:29pm)
Why would Godwin be the one to go to jail?
Can you think of someone else more deserving? I chose Godwin because he clearly knows *about* the images (though he probably will say he hasn't viewed them), and he is in a position to do something about them (something he may argue against, but trust me if these were photographs of actual children he'd have made sure they were gone).
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:35pm)
Meanwhile, why are we jumping to the most dramatic of possible conclusions?
Wouldn't it make more sense that, if the FBI finds the images to be in violation of 18 USC 1466A, that their guidance to the WMF would be to take the images down, or otherwise face prosecution?
No, that's not how violations of the law are supposed to work. You don't get a warning the first time you commit a felony and a request to cease future criminal activity.
QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:35pm)
I don't think the FBI would play the sort of brinksmanship game where the first move is a raid on New Montgomery Street, and Sue Gardner and Michael Snow being led off in handcuffs. The first move would more likely be a warning of some sort. Then it would be the (predictable) response of the WMF to refuse to do anything about the smut.
I'm sure the WMF would remove the images if they got that warning. In fact, I'm sure Godwin would have them removed (quietly, by making some sort of "strong suggestion" to someone with the proper authority) if he thought they were in violation.
QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:33pm)
QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 2:14pm)
I'm sorry, but that's a scary thought. I'm in full support of child porn laws. But this is not a child porn law, it's an obscenity law. And obscenity laws are effectively thoughtcrimes.
Why is an obscenity law a thoughtcrime? A thoughtcrime is essentially private, yes? How is public obscenity private?
The WMF's actions may be public, but the law does not restrict the crime to public actions.
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Anthony, it occurs to me that you are thinking of Federal statutes the way Wikipedians think of their WP:Rules -- as blunt weapons to be selected at will from the armory to use as a cudgel against one's opponents.
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:33pm)
A thought experiment
A reality experiment. Who should go to jail? Isn't anyone willing to follow the logical conclusion of their claim that the law is being violated? I bet Sanger is intellectually honest enough to do that. If one of you happens to get a chance, can you ask him for me?
Rob Zicari and Lizzy Borden are in jail for distributing obscenity. Why not Mike Godwin and Sue Gardner?
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:48pm)
Anthony, it occurs to me that you are thinking of Federal statutes the way Wikipedians think of their WP:Rules -- as blunt weapons to be selected at will from the armory to use as a cudgel against one's opponents.
No, they shouldn't be "selected at will". Not at all. I'm arguing the exact opposite. They should be enforced evenly.
Anyway, Sanger is the one who first said that the law should be enforced. I'm just wondering who it is he wants thrown in jail in order to enforce it.
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QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 2:00pm)
QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 9:57am)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 1:53pm)
Governments do not enforce laws evenly. If they did, almost everyone would be in jail (or at least awaiting trial).
Or maybe we'd have a sane set of laws.
All written by prisoners …
Prisoners? No, you missed the "at least awaiting trial" part. I don't think it's true that almost everyone would be in jail if governments enforced laws evenly. Just because you and "Moulton" are criminals doesn't mean everyone is.
"How dare I suggest the law be enforced?" - Larry Sanger
Prisoners? No, you missed the "at least awaiting trial" part. I don't think it's true that almost everyone would be in jail if governments enforced laws evenly. Just because you and "Moulton" are criminals doesn't mean everyone is.
"How dare I suggest the law be enforced?" — Larry Sanger
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Is Sanger saying someone should be sent to jail, or is Sanger saying that the FBI should review this incident and make a professional decision as to whether or not the law is being broken, and if so, by whom?
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 2:17pm)
Is Sanger saying someone should be sent to jail, or is Sanger saying that the FBI should review this incident and make a professional decision as to whether or not the law is being broken, and if so, by whom?
I thought the latter.
What's the point of making a decision as to whether or not the law is being broken if you're not going to then follow up and make some arrests? Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Surely Sanger understands this.
He says he wants the law to be enforced. I'm taking him at his word. I've emailed him for further clarification, but I don't expect him to reply to me (we've stopped conversing with each other a while ago over some completely unrelated issues). If you want to know what Sanger is saying, I'd recommend you email him yourself.
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QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 10:21am)
QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 2:17pm)
Is Sanger saying someone should be sent to jail, or is Sanger saying that the FBI should review this incident and make a professional decision as to whether or not the law is being broken, and if so, by whom?
I thought the latter.
What's the point of making a decision as to whether or not the law is being broken if you're not going to then follow up and make some arrests? Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Surely Sanger understands this.
He says he wants the law to be enforced. I'm taking him at his word. I've emailed him for further clarification, but I don't expect him to reply to me (we've stopped conversing with each other a while ago over some completely unrelated issues). If you want to know what Sanger is saying, I'd recommend you email him yourself.
The law may not have been broken. It would be prudent to await the FBI's public comment on this incident before we start picking and choosing who is most guilty and how long they should serve time.
COI alert: It is my personal hope that Sue's spider hands are cuffed, along with Mike Godwin's, Erik Moeller's, and Jimbo Wales', and (at the very least) the four of them are shuttled off to prison. I don't care what this says of our freedoms as a liberal democratic society. I'll trade some of my freedoms to get those four off the streets for a few years. Chances of that happening, though, are about 1 in 286,000, so let's just wait and see.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 3:05pm)
The law may not have been broken.
Quite true. Proving the elements of "knowingly" and "obscene" would be quite an uphill battle, especially if the element of "knowingly" adheres to the element of "obscene".
QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 3:05pm)
It would be prudent to await the FBI's public comment on this incident before we start picking and choosing who is most guilty and how long they should serve time.
If we're going to say that someone "may be" violating a law, and we're further going to say that this is a law that ought to be enforced, shouldn't we admit that we're saying that someone "may" deserve to spend the minimum possible jail sentence offered by such a violation?
To quote Sanger:
QUOTE
But saying that violations of the statute by Commons (if the FBI agrees that they are violations) are low priority in this case surely implies that 18 USC §1466A should not be enforced. Besides, Wikimedia projects are now very high-profile. Long gone are the days when Wikipedia and sister projects were sites known only to geeks. If the FBI ignores violations of a statute on Wikimedia servers, that sends a message to the many others who collectively would be much harder to regulate.
Now, he continually accuses "Commons" (or "Wikimedia") of the violation of the law. But if "Commons" is in violation of the law, there must be some actual human co-conspirators. Again, you can't have "knowledge" that the distribution is taking place without a human being present to have that knowledge.
QUOTE(thekohser @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 3:05pm)
I'll trade some of my freedoms to get those four off the streets for a few years.
Definitely a place where you and I disagree. I guess it's good that you're at least being honest about it.
I think there are a lot of people taking that position. They don't care about the law, they just want to see Wikipedia get bad publicity. But I don't think Sanger is one of them. He seems to honestly support the law in question - a minimum of five years in prison for distributing (or, indeed, merely receiving) obscene fictional cartoons.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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1. It is for the FBI to investigate, not to prosecute. Sanger is therefore acting appropriately in bringing it to the FBI's attention.
2. Who is to blame? Well, the co-conspirators are:
* the uploaders for sure. * the WMF, as they cannot now deny that they are aware that there are such images, and regardless of formal notification, they have not taken reasonable steps to identify such materials once they became aware of the possibility. * The administrators of Commons - who have volunteered to oversee; especially those who have zealously enforced other policies such as copyright yet have chosen not to enforce obscenity. * Possibly, but less likely, any person who viewed the inappropriate content and therefore has downloaded it onto their PC, and has not reported it.
3. What should be done? a) the FBI need to establish whether there is content that falls within the remit of that law. b) Potentially in consultation with prosecutors, determine whether there is something that requires forwarding for legal action, or is something that can be dealt with with warnings or cautions. However, in the UK, a serious offence should not be treated with a caution (though it does happen, even for GBH). c) If it was found that there was enough evidence of a crime, then quite simply, it goes to court, and then it is for a court to decide guilt or innocence and the appropriate punishment.
What is not appropriate is suggesting that it is wrong to report a possible crime.
a) the FBI need to establish whether there is content that falls within the remit of that law.
It is not the job of the FBI to describe what content is legal and what content is illegal. It is the job of the law to do so, and to do so in a clear manner by which does not require a federal agency to interpret.
In any case, I highly doubt the FBI is going to engage in such an act of prior restraint.
QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 5:40pm)
What is not appropriate is suggesting that it is wrong to report a possible crime.
And who do you believe is doing that?
I do think it is sometimes wrong to report a possible crime. But in this particular case, I don't think Sanger was wrong for reporting it. I do think he's wrong for publicizing his report in the manner that he did. I do think he's wrong for defending the particular law in question. I do think he's most likely wrong that there was a crime committed. I do think he's wrong for using the term "child pornography" (those he's admitted that error).
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There are serveral points of impact that come into play by Sanger making his concerns known in such a public manner. At a minimum these consist of:
WMF tax exempt status.
Sue Gardners relationship with Moeller.
Moeller and WMF relationship Sloan Foundation, who have awarded WMF $3,000,000, a success attributed to Moeller that puts his predessor Danny (no grants were sought) Wool to shame . This program officer that supervises that grant for the foundation must be closely watching this storey and if they knew of Moeller's prior statement's wondering what they where thinking. If these statement were not know to the foundation they must appear to be a material omission at this point.
A moral argument presented to "the community" addressing the unacceptable nature of the content. Not my favorite one, but one Sanger seems concerned with still.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 8:02pm)
QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 5:40pm)
a) the FBI need to establish whether there is content that falls within the remit of that law.
It is not the job of the FBI to describe what content is legal and what content is illegal. It is the job of the law to do so, and to do so in a clear manner by which does not require a federal agency to interpret.
In any case, I highly doubt the FBI is going to engage in such an act of prior restraint.
You are rather obviously misquoting me in that reframing - it is not their job to descibe what content is legal - it is their job to measure content against the descriptions set out in the law and assess whether it appears that there is a likelihood of a problem as the first step in a legal process.
It is quite clear in my post that the courts finally decide whether a crime has been committed, but the police do an initial investigation to decide whether there appears to be a potential illegal act - "a case to answer". I'm not sure what the situation is in detail the States, but in Britain, a private individual cannot start criminal proceedings, we cannot go to the Crown Prosecution Service and ask them to start a case. We go to the police; they investigate; they determine whether there appears to be a case to answer, which laws appear to be broken, and in co-operation with the CPS, decide what legal action is appropriate. This isn't Les Miserables you know. The State gives the police that role. When there have been problems in the Houses of Parliament, the MPs do not commence criminal actions, even when they write the laws, they call the police to investigate.
All in all, I would be bemused at your wild re-interpretation of my comment, but this is the Internet.
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QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 3:27pm)
It is quite clear in my post that the courts finally decide whether a crime has been committed, but the police do an initial investigation to decide whether there appears to be a potential illegal act - "a case to answer". I'm not sure what the situation is in detail the States, but in Britain, a private individual cannot start criminal proceedings, we cannot go to the Crown Prosecution Service and ask them to start a case. We go to the police; they investigate; they determine whether there appears to be a case to answer, which laws appear to be broken, and in co-operation with the CPS, decide what legal action is appropriate. This isn't Les Miserables you know. .
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All, I just thought I would log in here and thank you for your support. I've never written on the Wikipedia Review before, but it seems that the quality of discussion has become a lot more subtle and interesting since the site was first founded. Also, when SB Johnny wrote this, suddenly everything became so clear! Also, I'm making use of these instructions on how to increase the signal-to-noise level.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 12:06am)
All, I just thought I would log in here and thank you for your support. I've never written on the Wikipedia Review before, but it seems that the quality of discussion has become a lot more subtle and interesting since the site was first founded. Also, when SB Johnny wrote this, suddenly everything became so clear! Also, I'm making use of these instructions on how to increase the signal-to-noise level.
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QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 5:09pm)
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 12:06am)
All, I just thought I would log in here and thank you for your support. I've never written on the Wikipedia Review before, but it seems that the quality of discussion has become a lot more subtle and interesting since the site was first founded. Also, when SB Johnny wrote this, suddenly everything became so clear! Also, I'm making use of these instructions on how to increase the signal-to-noise level.
Welcome to Wikipedia Review.
Yes, welcome, and I feel obligated to apologize for Ottava's behaviour (in advance, just in case he decides to give you the Edwin Black treatment.)
Golly, Batman, lookit all the wishful thinking that goes on here!
Instead of shutting up and letting the FBI look into it in a professional manner, many WR regulars simply can't help fantasizing about seeing Mike Godwin or Sue Gardner in chains. I doubt it helps at all, and I seriously doubt anyone is going to jail regardless of what the FBI recommends to the DoJ.
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QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 12:16am)
I seriously doubt anyone is going to jail regardless of what the FBI recommends to the DoJ.
Me too, though that's mainly because I seriously doubt anyone broke the law and/or that an as-applied challenge to the constitutionality of the law would be upheld.
Of course, I also agree with Dr. Sanger when he says that "saying that violations of the statute by Commons (if the FBI agrees that they are violations) are low priority in this case surely implies that 18 USC §1466A should not be enforced." (I've said as much in my answer to the second question here.)
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 7:06pm)
All, I just thought I would log in here and thank you for your support. I've never written on the Wikipedia Review before, but it seems that the quality of discussion has become a lot more subtle and interesting since the site was first founded. Also, when SB Johnny wrote this, suddenly everything became so clear!
Anyway, welcome to WR. I myself had to comment on that Techdirt piece when someone tried to characterize drawings of child sexual abuse as "fictional child abuse," so that they could then attempt to draw a bogus parallel between that and "fictional murder," as if images and text are fundamentally the same, or as if drawings or stories of children being raped should be no more disturbing to kids (and their parents) than a Margaret Truman novel.
It's amazing what some people will convince themselves of in order to avoid having cracks appear in their belief systems, and IMO the internet only feeds this tendency. Moreover, I'd say the WP'ers reaction to the FBI letter being treated as news worth reporting (even if it is just on Fox) is considerably more instructive than their reaction to the letter itself.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(anthony @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 11:57pm)
QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 10:27pm)
I'm not sure what the situation is in detail the States
Then why the long detailed description of what should be done? I'm sorry if I misunderstood your post. But it still seems to me that it is incorrect.
The detail may be different but surely it is the case that the police are charged with investigating possible crimes which the public bring to their attention? At the end of their process, you either have a fuss about nothing, or you have a case to answer. What I don't see is why you should say "Nothing to do with the police, it is for the law to decide."
Where I would agree with some critics is that there is a need to be careful about going public, because at the point you create public interest, you have the potential to undermine the legal process. There is, of course, an advantage in that if your intention is not to get people punished, but to bring the dubious action to a stop.
Seeing as Larry is here - hi, Larry, we've not been introduced! - perhaps he can outline what he hoped to achieve in simple terms, what he thought might happen if the police thought that there was a problem with Commons?
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QUOTE(EricBarbour @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 7:16pm)
Instead of shutting up and letting the FBI look into it in a professional manner, many WR regulars simply can't help fantasizing about seeing Mike Godwin or Sue Gardner in chains. I doubt it helps at all, and I seriously doubt anyone is going to jail regardless of what the FBI recommends to the DoJ.
It definitely doesn't help, but it probably doesn't hurt so much, either - the WMF folks aren't going to change their opinions of us (or of specific WR posters) simply because of a few more strident comments, of which there are plenty around here. The real question is whether or not it gives them a real conception of the depth of enmity there is towards them, or whether they simply assume it's just the same handful of people in each case, and that all of them are simply insane or whatever. I'd assume the latter, but then again, I never thought Larry Sanger would ever register an account here, either!
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 5:06pm)
All, I just thought I would log in here and thank you for your support. I've never written on the Wikipedia Review before, but it seems that the quality of discussion has become a lot more subtle and interesting since the site was first founded.
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QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 12:29am)
The detail may be different but surely it is the case that the police are charged with investigating possible crimes which the public bring to their attention?
Generally the police are there to figure out the facts, not to figure out the law. So yeah, they're charged with investigating "possible crimes", but the "possible" comes into play due to unclear facts, not unclear law. Unclear law is, in itself, unconstitutional.
QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 12:30am)
I never thought Larry Sanger would ever register an account here, either!
Gotta agree with you.
I doubt even more that he'll stick around very long. But then, he's found the ignore button, so maybe I'm wrong about that. (And I probably don't have to worry about what I say, since I'm probably the first one he ignored.)
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QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 8:29pm)
Seeing as Larry is here - hi, Larry, we've not been introduced! - perhaps he can outline what he hoped to achieve in simple terms, what he thought might happen if the police thought that there was a problem with Commons?
Hi dogbisquit and thanks for the welcome. If you don't mind, I'm not going to answer, because I don't want to play this game. If I say, "I expected that some people would be arrested," then the Wikipedians will howl that I was trying to get people arrested. If I say, "They'll just get a take-down notice," or "I didn't think about it," and instead somebody does get arrested, then later they will say, "Sanger acted irresponsibly, without thinking."
If, as I suspect, the intent behind the question is to accuse me of being irresponsible in serious matters, I'll simply say that I know very well that what I did was serious.
But then, what Wikipedia and WMF does daily with people's reputations and with respect to the law is serious as well. They have acted outside of the law and basic moral standards on too many occasions, and it's time they were held responsible for this. It gives me no pleasure at all to say this, but it seems necessary for the law to act in order to rein in their most egregious abuses.
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I agree that these are serious issues. I'm not qualified to say whether the content of Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons falls afoul of the law, or what the legal remedies would be most appropriate in case they did violate some criminal or civil statute.
But I would like to see the all the abuses ended, including the ones that are of an ethical nature.
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QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 8:25pm)
It's amazing what some people will convince themselves of in order to avoid having cracks appear in their belief systems, and IMO the internet only feeds this tendency. Moreover, I'd say the WP'ers reaction to the FBI letter being treated as news worth reporting (even if it is just on Fox) is considerably more instructive than their reaction to the letter itself.
Well, the difference is that it has become public--it's beyond the fold of Internet geeks and Wikipedia followers and commentators. Expect the vituperation to become even more intense if the FBI really does take up the case. The problem isn't really so much the accusation as it is the introduction of the accusation to full-fledged adults and established institutions who naturally have higher standards than Wikipedia's. It's like snitching. As to myself, I call it bringing the law, and ordinary standards of personal responsibility, honesty, and basic decency to bear on a Wikipedia community that thinks it has the inviolate right to live outside of such standards.
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 8:33pm)
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 5:06pm)
All, I just thought I would log in here and thank you for your support. I've never written on the Wikipedia Review before, but it seems that the quality of discussion has become a lot more subtle and interesting since the site was first founded.
Well, I should hope it's that too--it's been five years or so, hasn't it? But I seem to remember this place as being dominated by banned Wikipedians who were real pieces of work, that I had no desire whatsoever to interact with.
I don't know how much it's changed now, but now I am armed with a trusty kill file, I won't let it bother me. Looking forward to my next *plonk*. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/evilgrin.gif)
QUOTE
Most of the rest of us have been here for quite some time, you know. Welcome to the unofficial party.
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Larry, I'd like to entertain a serious conversation with you about the pluses and minuses of alternative methods, ranging from 1) the invocation of legal remedies to 2) the promotion of higher standards of academic excellence and journalistic ethics to 3) the use of satire and parody to focus attention on the problem.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 9:54pm)
Larry, I'd like to entertain a serious conversation with you about the pluses and minuses of alternative methods, ranging from 1) the invocation of legal remedies to 2) the promotion of higher standards of academic excellence and journalistic ethics to 3) the use of satire and parody to focus attention on the problem.
Moulton, if you mean alternative methods of getting the public to understand Wikipedia's problems, and putting serious pressure on Wikipedia to reform in various ways...well...
I think two things could help. The first is what I'm doing now--encouraging legal remedies and the light of public exposure that would inevitably follow. The second is a major expose from a first-rank journalist in a first-rank journal like Harper's or The Atlantic or The New Yorker, which completely humiliates the rascals most in need of humiliation. The articles from a few years back by Stacy Schiff and Marshall Poe were interesting but they didn't go into the dirt.
For a long time I guess I just thought that Wikipedia's irresponsibility and stupidity were common knowledge. Then, in this recent conversation I had with the EDTECH mailing list people--technology directors at school districts, I would have thought they'd be more plugged in--I discovered that all of these otherwise quite technically hip people had apparently bought the Wikipedia hype lock, stock, and barrel. They thought the main problem with it is that it is produced by amateurs, and they are still all goggle-eyed over the power of collaboration. One women who makes a living giving such people advice actually advocates for the de-filtering of Wikipedia; well, she didn't know what "NSFW" meant, and apparently didn't know anything about all the porn on WP either. Oddly, all the discussion of the issue quickly stopped when I posted my FBI message there. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)
A way to solve the problem in a different way is for another reference website to overtake it in size and reliability, rendering it less relevant. Well, it's still possible, but who will do it and when remains to be seen.
And then there's another way I thought of the other day, inspired by some person's very clever post here on WR: form a new Wikipedia (political) party. Formulate a strategy to seek political power in Wikiland. Force the people in power now to form a party themselves. Then let more robust democracy, and the open society that results, do their magic.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 9:49pm)
A way to solve the problem in a different way is for another reference website to overtake it in size and reliability, rendering it less relevant. Well, it's still possible, but who will do it and when remains to be seen.
And then there's another way I thought of the other day, inspired by some person's very clever post here on WR: form a new Wikipedia (political) party. Formulate a strategy to seek political power in Wikiland. Force the people in power now to form a party themselves. Then let more robust democracy, and the open society that results, do their magic.
I have been impressed with your recent approach to imposing social responsibility on Wikipedia which has focused on the levers of influence of institutions and authorities outside the project that can bring needed changes. I believe to return to internal strategies and processes will be a step backwards. As you have recently noted the Wikipedia community is insular and self-interested, excessively concerned with its own unimpeded vehicle for expression without showing appropriate concern for the needs of those outside there little world. This has lead to serious errors such as the hosting of irresponsible content relating to children, the failure to implement even minimal child protection measures for child users of the site as well as an unwillingness to implement the most oblivious reforms to address the concerns of BLP subjects. Look to outside advocacy groups, experts, journalists and law enforcement. Do not become enmeshed in internal politics and dramas.
Again, thank you for your efforts to bring some minimal responsibility to Wikipedia.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 8:51pm)
...I seem to remember this place as being dominated by banned Wikipedians who were real pieces of work, that I had no desire whatsoever to interact with.
Most of the real pieces of work have been replaced by fake pieces of work, many (most?) of whom aren't banned at all - with several prominent exceptions, of course. I myself have never made a single Wikipedia edit, and most people would probably call me the "head admin" here. I might also be considered responsible for emphasizing more levity and jocularity among regular posters than there probably was originally... However, the site's owner (who isn't me) may be one of those people you mention, though I doubt she was all that unpleasant to deal with even then - you might have known her as "Mistress Selina Kyle." (She doesn't post much these days, though!)
I have to admit that I was incredulous, at least initially, about your not being aware of those images on Commons. I'm not saying that I thought you'd seen them personally, though - just that we'd been discussing them here for some time, and these things have a tendency to get talked about. I hadn't realized the degree of disaffection you seem to have from there, though, so I think I owe you an apology for that. Sorry I doubted you!
Having said that, presumably all of us here knew about this stuff and nobody (AFAIK) reported it to the FBI. Maybe we just assumed they knew, too, or maybe none of us felt like we had the clout or the gravitas to garner any attention from them, or maybe we assumed they wouldn't care no matter who reported it. Whatever the reason, it was a fairly big step, and I for one am glad it was you who took it and not, say, me. (And who am I, anyway? Nobody seems to know, including myself.)
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QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 11:15pm)
Having said that, presumably all of us here knew about this stuff and nobody (AFAIK) reported it to the FBI.
Speak for yourself, Somey.
From the FBI site, most citizens trying to report something related to child protection are shunted away to www.CyberTipLine.com, which redirects here.
Some time ago, I spent a good amount of time filling out a detailed report about how underage volunteer administrators were managing adult pornography files on Wikipedia.
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QUOTE(Somey @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 3:15am)
Having said that, presumably all of us here knew about this stuff and nobody (AFAIK) reported it to the FBI. Maybe we just assumed they knew, too
We know they knew about the actual child pornography (i.e. Virgin Killer), and did nothing about it. Why should we think they'd do something about the fake child pornography?
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 8:25pm)
But then, what Wikipedia and WMF does daily with people's reputations and with respect to the law is serious as well. They have acted outside of the law and basic moral standards on too many occasions, and it's time they were held responsible for this. It gives me no pleasure at all to say this, but it seems necessary for the law to act in order to rein in their most egregious abuses.
Given that nothing else has been successful at it in any real measure, there doesn't seem to be much other choice.
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It may be that a multi-pronged approach will be required.
For a number of reasons (that I won't go into here), I don't have much faith in the legal angle. Suffice it to say the wheels of justice grind slow (when they grind at all), and the cost puts legal remedies out of range for all but well-funded long-term projects.
Internal politics in the Wikisphere is hamstrung by rampant corruption from the top down.
Promoting higher standards of academic excellence and journalist ethics has not only failed, the effort to introduce the fundamentals of ethics was expressly declared "beyond the scope" of WMF-sponsored projects by Wales himself.
Individual editors who have run afoul of the central cabal have managed to find alternative sites to craft their work, free from the dispiriting politics and spammish inquisitions that plague Wikipedia.
At this juncture, I believe WP's biggest threats come from three attractive nuisances: vandals, trolls, and drama-mongers.
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Thu 29th April 2010, 1:03am)
Mr. Information-wants-to-be-free is probably wishing wewy wewy hard that certain information about his past opinions, now that he has a good day-job, would remain hidden in the net's nooks and crannies, never be found. Alas, this is not the way the net works.
Rectal exam time, Mr. Moeller. And I can't think of a more appropriate patient.
Here's a blog with all kinds of Moeller edits AND a link to his defense of non-violent child-porn:
This cite was given by Sanger in his letter to the FBI and cc: to WMF. From which we find that Councillor Godwin actually does do something during the day. Godwin hinted darkly that Sanger saying that Moeller was "well-known for his defense of pedophilia" was perhaps actionable. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) Erm, I suppose WP:NLT doesn't apply to Godwin, even when published in the WP:SIGNPOST. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif) That would be asking too much. But here's Godwin's full response. Given that Moeller has explicitly defended child porn as being harmess, I'm not sure that it is actionable if somebody says that he's well known for defending pedophilia. He's more well-known all the time (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) . And the rest is splitting a mighty fine hair-- since who else but a pedophile would be interested in child porn?? (Not me, Mr. Godwin (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif) )
Milton, in the interest of fairness, there really is a translation problem here. What Erik Möller said was that there is no evidence that viewing nonviolent (adult) porn harms youths. At no time did he say anything to the effect that nonviolent child porn was okay.
Furthermore, google at times translates "gewaltfrei" (which means "nonviolent") as "violent", e.g. "so far there is no empirical evidence to show a negative impact of violent porn" reads "bisher kein empirischer Beleg für eine Negativwirkung von gewaltfreien Pornos existiert" in the German original, meaning "so far there is no empirical evidence to show a negative impact of nonviolent porn".
That is not to say that everything he says in the article would be uncontroversial, but it's important to get right what he actually did say.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 2:25am)
QUOTE(dogbiscuit @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 8:29pm)
Seeing as Larry is here - hi, Larry, we've not been introduced! - perhaps he can outline what he hoped to achieve in simple terms, what he thought might happen if the police thought that there was a problem with Commons?
Hi dogbisquit and thanks for the welcome. If you don't mind, I'm not going to answer, because I don't want to play this game. If I say, "I expected that some people would be arrested," then the Wikipedians will howl that I was trying to get people arrested. If I say, "They'll just get a take-down notice," or "I didn't think about it," and instead somebody does get arrested, then later they will say, "Sanger acted irresponsibly, without thinking."
If, as I suspect, the intent behind the question is to accuse me of being irresponsible in serious matters, I'll simply say that I know very well that what I did was serious.
But then, what Wikipedia and WMF does daily with people's reputations and with respect to the law is serious as well. They have acted outside of the law and basic moral standards on too many occasions, and it's time they were held responsible for this. It gives me no pleasure at all to say this, but it seems necessary for the law to act in order to rein in their most egregious abuses.
Far too suspicious! I have, in the past, attempted to trigger action from the UK by contacting various child protection areas about elements, really with the aim of forcing the WMF to accept that they have a duty of care with regard to Wikipedia. Didn't get a response, in part because I simply do not think that normal people hear the words Wikipedia and understand it is not an encyclopedia - they are naive.
It therefore needs someone to use their public position to get them to take notice.
What I would hope would happen is that it dawns on the WMF that there is a real problem that if they do not address it, will get them into serious trouble - on the basis that they are well aware of the problems, but for some distorted reasoning they either do not care, or do not perceive it to be a problem.
I happen to believe the solution is fairly simple, but it requires the WMF to accept that while they can hide behind S.230, they still have an ability, and a duty, to set up processes to deal with the various problems that exist within Wikipedia.
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QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 11:01am)
Milton, in the interest of fairness, there really is a translation problem here. What Erik Möller said was that there is no evidence that viewing nonviolent (adult) porn harms youths. At no time did he say anything to the effect that nonviolent child porn was okay.
Furthermore, google at times translates "gewaltfrei" (which means "nonviolent") as "violent", e.g. "so far there is no empirical evidence to show a negative impact of violent porn" reads "bisher kein empirischer Beleg für eine Negativwirkung von gewaltfreien Pornos existiert" in the German original, meaning "so far there is no empirical evidence to show a negative impact of nonviolent porn".
That is not to say that everything he says in the article would be uncontroversial, but it's important to get right what he actually did say.
And, what are Erik Moeller's academic/scholarly credentials that makes him an expert in this area? Or, is he an amateur researcher delving into the fascinating subject of adult pornography's effects on children? I have some recollection that Moeller's professional experience is as a freelance journalist, software developer, and project manager. Such an interesting selection, then, for his free time!
I suppose an amateur may have missed these sources:
QUOTE
W. L. Marshall, "The Use of Sexually Explicit Stimuli by Rapists, Child Molesters, and Nonoffenders," The Journal of Sex Research 25, no.2 (May 1988): 267-88. * ...early exposure (under fourteen years of age) to pornography is related to greater involvement in deviant sexual practice, particularly rape.
QUOTE
K.E. Davis and G.N. Braucht, Exposure to Pornography, Character and Sexual Deviance, Technical Reports of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970), 7. * ...males who are exposed to a great deal of erotica before the age of 14 are more sexually active and engage in more varied sexual behaviors as adults than is true for males not so exposed.
QUOTE
Interview with Ann Burgess, professor of nursing, University of Pennsylvania, 15 January 1997. "Pornography - Victims and Perpetrators," Symposium on Media Violence & Pornography, Proceedings Resource Book and Research Guide, ed. D. Scott (1984). * ...pornography short-circuits and/or distorts the normal personality development process and supplies misinformation about a child's sexuality, sense of self, and body that leaves the child confused, changed, and damaged.
Re: by Mike Masnick(profile) My argument is that Wikipedia is an important project, and precedent-setting, and if the government takes a stand here, it will do significant good in the fight against the normalization of pedophilia
Larry, I'm curious. Do you HONESTLY believe that there is ANY movement whatsoever towards normalizing pedophilia? Of all the silly things you've said in this threat, that is, by far, the most ridiculous.
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92.May 3rd, 2010 @ 2:29amListen to Larry by tyciol(profile) He`s got plans for this, as soon as we take down the paintings, we are going to get in the Delorean and go interrogate the guy who drew them in 1905 and make sure he didn`t base it on anything real.
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93.May 3rd, 2010 @ 9:32amby Larry Sanger @Mike Masnick: all right, I'll bite. Of course, if you're like certain people who insist on using "pedophilia" only to mean a psychological disorder in which there is sexual attraction exclusively to children, then no, of course there's no movement to normalize that disorder. Who wants to normalize a disorder? But if you use the word "pedophilia" the way that most people use it, to mean any actual sexual relations between full-fledged adults and children below the age of consent, then, yeah, there is such a movement. You mean you didn't know that? Yes, there are people who regard pedophilia as an action regardless of motives, and a terrible crime, and there is an anarchist-associated movement to make this all hunky-dory.
Yes, there is a nasty little movement devoted to normalizing at least some sexual relations between adults and children--relations that are now considered deeply criminal and deeply wrong by sane, civilized people. That there are people out there plugging for this is well documented on sites like http://wikisposure.com/ (BTW, search for "Tyciol" there, then look at the username of your most recent commenter) and you can read more on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_reform and this copy of an old Wikipedia article that was apparently deleted: http://www.bookrags.com/wiki/Pro-pedophile_activism . These sorts of people see nothing at all wrong with, say, 12-year-olds (that's Levine's cut-off; and for others, younger people) being able to legally consent to sex with full-fledged adults. I do.
You mean you really didn't know all this? Or were you baiting me to say it, so you could mock me when I said it? Well, go ahead. Dig yourself into your hole a little farther, Masnick. Mock away.
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I haven't looked into the literature on this, but I believe there is some evidence that childhood traumas such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual abuse are a factor in the emergence of Cluster B personality disorders in adulthood.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 4:43pm)
QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 11:01am)
Milton, in the interest of fairness, there really is a translation problem here. What Erik Möller said was that there is no evidence that viewing nonviolent (adult) porn harms youths. At no time did he say anything to the effect that nonviolent child porn was okay.
Furthermore, google at times translates "gewaltfrei" (which means "nonviolent") as "violent", e.g. "so far there is no empirical evidence to show a negative impact of violent porn" reads "bisher kein empirischer Beleg für eine Negativwirkung von gewaltfreien Pornos existiert" in the German original, meaning "so far there is no empirical evidence to show a negative impact of nonviolent porn".
That is not to say that everything he says in the article would be uncontroversial, but it's important to get right what he actually did say.
And, what are Erik Moeller's academic/scholarly credentials that makes him an expert in this area? Or, is he an amateur researcher delving into the fascinating subject of adult pornography's effects on children? I have some recollection that Moeller's professional experience is as a freelance journalist, software developer, and project manager. Such an interesting selection, then, for his free time!
I suppose an amateur may have missed these sources:
QUOTE
W. L. Marshall, "The Use of Sexually Explicit Stimuli by Rapists, Child Molesters, and Nonoffenders," The Journal of Sex Research 25, no.2 (May 1988): 267-88. * ...early exposure (under fourteen years of age) to pornography is related to greater involvement in deviant sexual practice, particularly rape.
QUOTE
K.E. Davis and G.N. Braucht, Exposure to Pornography, Character and Sexual Deviance, Technical Reports of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970), 7. * ...males who are exposed to a great deal of erotica before the age of 14 are more sexually active and engage in more varied sexual behaviors as adults than is true for males not so exposed.
QUOTE
Interview with Ann Burgess, professor of nursing, University of Pennsylvania, 15 January 1997. "Pornography - Victims and Perpetrators," Symposium on Media Violence & Pornography, Proceedings Resource Book and Research Guide, ed. D. Scott (1984). * ...pornography short-circuits and/or distorts the normal personality development process and supplies misinformation about a child's sexuality, sense of self, and body that leaves the child confused, changed, and damaged.
The statement above, "so far there is no empirical evidence to show a negative impact of nonviolent porn", is not Möller's own; he is quoting (approvingly) one Martin Schweer, a "professor of pedagogical psychology", who was one of the speakers at the conference.
I've been wondering if I should translate the whole article; except it would probably be 1 or 2 days' work, and that is a bit much. But if there are some passages in the google translation that are of particular interest to anyone, I am happy to oblige. I think I am not the only German speaker here, and another reviewer can check my translation.
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Ben "Cyde Weys" McIlwain probably put it best when he said,
QUOTE
There is no room for sophomore philosophizing and moralizing on such a damaging subject... Erik embodies one of the main problems with Wikipedia: it allows people with no real training or knowledge in a subject area to nevertheless insert their own personal views into the encyclopedia by sheer force of being a prolific Wikipedian. It’s bad enough when such a person is writing the articles, but it’s terrible when they’re #2 in the line of people running the whole place!
Just curious though, since you cited my post elsewhere: are you in the "(a.) Wikipedia must die" group, or the "(c.) serious critique is necessary" group, or (a.+c.) both?
Also (and no offense, but): if Jimmy hadn't been such a dick to you over the years, would you have still taken this course of action? I'm just curious how much of this is a battle of egos vs. a conflict of ideals... or (again), both.
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Of course there is another path. A critic can be indifferent to the survival of Wikipedia altogether. He can uphold external expectations, standards and practices. Measure Wikipedia against these and let Wikipedia continued existence depend on its ability to make a satisfactory adjustment to external realities, like every other website, charity or entity of any kind.
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GBG has a point. An educator might prefer that all the students earn top grades, but is resigned to the observation that some students will do poorly.
The students who do poorly simply receive lower grades.
Right now, Wikipedia is not earning high marks. Perhaps it never will. So for the foreseeable future, I expect WP will simply receive a failing grade with respect to objective standards of accuracy, excellence, and ethics in online performance as a would-be encyclopedia.
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QUOTE(Somey @ Sun 2nd May 2010, 11:15pm)
I have to admit that I was incredulous, at least initially, about your not being aware of those images on Commons. I'm not saying that I thought you'd seen them personally, though - just that we'd been discussing them here for some time, and these things have a tendency to get talked about. I hadn't realized the degree of disaffection you seem to have from there, though, so I think I owe you an apology for that. Sorry I doubted you!
No problemo. I knew about the bountiful hardcore porn and "Virgin Killer" (did a blog post on the latter in 2008), but I did not know about the drawn child porn. I hardly ever looked at Wikipedia Review until recently. So, I really just didn't know, and I really was surprised. The contents of Category:Pedophilia was, for me, a new low--and pretty much the last straw.
I have to tell you that I might have done nothing if the statute itself did not say that my only positive defense was to report the violations to law enforcement. This personalized the situation for me, and made me consider the situation not just as a violation of the law, or as a potentially embarrassing scandal; it made me think of it as a personal and morally serious matter, and one that I am better-placed to address than many people.
QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 6:36am)
It may be that a multi-pronged approach will be required.
The more I think about your question, the more I think the most impactful thing could be a comprehensive, moral-philosophical expose of Wikipedia's history of governance snafus and scandals, from a respected journalist in a top-rank magazine, which is then read and discussed as much as, say, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" It would not just be a list of scandals, which are all old news, but a successful summing-up, something that connects the dots and explains to the uninitiated (which is almost everybody who uses Wikipedia) exactly how the various problems illustrate the project's patterns of abuse.
See, it's true that most people know that Wikipedia isn't perfect and that it has various problems and scandals, but these are regarded as little quirks, or as basic Internet stupidity at worst. Not very many people regard Wikipedia as a sort of rogue state, which is basically what it is. But if they knew what I, and most of the people on this forum, knew, there would be an uproar in many quarters. Wikipedia has been safe from serious external criticism only due to the ignorance about it on the part of people like those school district filter managers I was talking to.
Wikipedia is like any brand, it has a reputation, and its reputation needs to be brought more in line with reality. When that happens, one can hope that the WMF and/or ordinary Wikipedians will look to revitalize the project by making some positive changes.
@dogbiscuit--I understand, and I'd love to talk about it, but I don't really want to give people like Anthony the satisfaction of preening over his response to whatever I say.
QUOTE
I happen to believe the solution is fairly simple, but it requires the WMF to accept that while they can hide behind S.230, they still have an ability, and a duty, to set up processes to deal with the various problems that exist within Wikipedia.
I can certainly say that I hope that will happen. But then, the WMF has to take responsibility for making and enforcing policy. But the WMF desperately wants to avoid this, I'm sure. It would cause a veritable revolution within the ranks of Wikipedia; all the inmates in the asylum would revolt over the notion that the WMF can make and enforce policy. That's centralization. That's the end of their much-cherished anarchist-mob rule. For their part the WMF would hate it too because it means that they would then be answerable both to rank-and-file Wikipedians, who would demand more transparency and more meaningful democracy in exchange for the loss of their own arbitrary and unanswerable authority, and to the general public and authorities.
But, realistically speaking, I doubt this will happen just as a result of official action. The WMF will insist only on "taking down" whatever the authorities instruct them to take down. This avoids all the necessity of setting Wikipedia up as a proper polity. If the FBI or any other entity suggests that they set up processes for self-monitoring and taking down, they will push back hard, and if forced, they will try to make the processes as lightweight as possible, and tell the contributors that the government has ordered them to do this; meanwhile, Wikipedia's true believers will howl censorship at the tops of their lungs, and probably practice all sorts of "civil disobedience." In other words, the opposite of transparency, meaningful democracy, and more responsible governance.
Just curious though, since you cited my post elsewhere: are you in the "(a.) Wikipedia must die" group, or the "(c.) serious critique is necessary" group, or (a.+c.) both?
Also (and no offense, but): if Jimmy hadn't been such a dick to you over the years, would you have still taken this course of action? I'm just curious how much of this is a battle of egos vs. a conflict of ideals... or (again), both.
I really do think I would have the same reaction, and taken the same actions, regardless of how Jimmy Wales had treated me. If anything, his treatment of me has made this even harder for me, because now the feces-throwing howler monkeys of Wikipedia can accuse me of "payback." Anyone who knows me personally knows that I have a long history of speaking my mind to authority. I'm a classic nonconformist or individualist, not a 60s hippie type (we had plenty of those at Reed College where I went to school), but the type that is suspicious of "in" groups of all sorts. If I don't speak out when I can make a difference, I feel like I'm doing something wrong. It makes me feel cowardly.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 3:39pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 6:36am)
It may be that a multi-pronged approach will be required.
The more I think about your question, the more I think the most impactful thing could be a comprehensive, moral-philosophical expose of Wikipedia's history of governance snafus and scandals, from a respected journalist in a top-rank magazine, which is then read and discussed as much as, say, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" It would not just be a list of scandals, which are all old news, but a successful summing-up, something that connects the dots and explains to the uninitiated (which is almost everybody who uses Wikipedia) exactly how the various problems illustrate the project's patterns of abuse.
I agree with this, but it's been hard to find a journalist who is prepared to do this. I talked to Brian Bergstein of the Associated Press about this. While the idea intrigued him, he concluded that he could not undertake a project like that without giving up his role as an objective reporter of the high-tech beat. The only other two journalists who have enough background to do this are Cade Metz and Seth Finkelstein. And Finkestein says he is getting out of the journalism business. So at this point, I have no idea who would be poised to write such an in-depth piece that examined the governance problems of Wikipedia.
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 3:39pm)
WMF has to take responsibility for making and enforcing policy. But the WMF desperately wants to avoid this, I'm sure. It would cause a veritable revolution within the ranks of Wikipedia; all the inmates in the asylum would revolt over the notion that the WMF can make and enforce policy.
Are you aware of the flap along those very lines when Jimbo threatened to shut down Wikiversity over projects there that undertook to examine the ethical shortcomings of Wikipedia? Jimbo expressly declared course materials on managerial ethics to be "beyond the scope" of WMF-sponsored projects.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 3:39pm)
QUOTE
I happen to believe the solution is fairly simple, but it requires the WMF to accept that while they can hide behind S.230, they still have an ability, and a duty, to set up processes to deal with the various problems that exist within Wikipedia.
I can certainly say that I hope that will happen. But then, the WMF has to take responsibility for making and enforcing policy. But the WMF desperately wants to avoid this, I'm sure. It would cause a veritable revolution within the ranks of Wikipedia; all the inmates in the asylum would revolt over the notion that the WMF can make and enforce policy. That's centralization. That's the end of their much-cherished anarchist-mob rule. For their part the WMF would hate it too because it means that they would then be answerable both to rank-and-file Wikipedians, who would demand more transparency and more meaningful democracy in exchange for the loss of their own arbitrary and unanswerable authority, and to the general public and authorities.
But, realistically speaking, I doubt this will happen just as a result of official action. The WMF will insist only on "taking down" whatever the authorities instruct them to take down. This avoids all the necessity of setting Wikipedia up as a proper polity. If the FBI or any other entity suggests that they set up processes for self-monitoring and taking down, they will push back hard, and if forced, they will try to make the processes as lightweight as possible, and tell the contributors that the government has ordered them to do this; meanwhile, Wikipedia's true believers will howl censorship at the tops of their lungs, and probably practice all sorts of "civil disobedience." In other words, the opposite of transparency, meaningful democracy, and more responsible governance.
Quite so, unfortunately. The discussion on Commons is instructive: Commons:Commons_talk:Sexual_content/April_2010 ... lots of fighting tooth and nail at the very idea that Commons ought to do more than the law requires and try to track ages and model releases. note the consistent use of "prudery" and "censorship" as memes for attack.
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QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 2:17pm)
Of course there is another path. A critic can be indifferent to the survival of Wikipedia altogether. He can uphold external expectations, standards and practices. Measure Wikipedia against these and let Wikipedia continued existence depend on its ability to make a satisfactory adjustment to external realities, like every other website, charity or entity of any kind.
Somebody (I forget who) once said "A reasonable man adjusts to the outside world. An unreasonable man tries to get the outside world to adjust to him. All progress is due to unreasonable men."
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 9:26pm)
The only other two journalists who have enough background to do this are Cade Metz and Seth Finkelstein. And Finkestein says he is getting out of the journalism business. So at this point, I have no idea who would be poised to write such an in-depth piece that examined the governance problems of Wikipedia.
Did you see the Edwin Black thread? Black has written about Wikipedia before, and might make a contribution here.
I think Larry is right in mentioning the need to "connect the dots", because "he said -- she said" accounts like this one by Black's colleague won't attract significant attention.
It is ironic that it is often the broad brushstrokes that take liberties with the details (viz. Fox News) that generate momentum and attract attention.
It's what makes the press a good tool for social entrepreneurship, but very often a poor source for encyclopaedic writing. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif)
So, I suggest we have to think about what is the right frame to sell the problems of Wikipedia to the public. Is the public out there going to care about admin abuses? I doubt it. This sort of thing is commonplace everywhere, and half the time such complaints are put down to sour grapes, rightly or wrongly.
Child protection/porn is one viable frame. Another is the BLP/privacy issue, well used by Robert Fisk (T-H-L-K-D) here, in a major UK newspaper. If you can attach admin abuse to one of these hot button issues, then someone might be interested.
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QUOTE(dtobias @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 3:50pm)
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 2:17pm)
Of course there is another path. A critic can be indifferent to the survival of Wikipedia altogether. He can uphold external expectations, standards and practices. Measure Wikipedia against these and let Wikipedia continued existence depend on its ability to make a satisfactory adjustment to external realities, like every other website, charity or entity of any kind.
Somebody (I forget who) once said "A reasonable man adjusts to the outside world. An unreasonable man tries to get the outside world to adjust to him. All progress is due to unreasonable men."
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman. A rather stronger affirmation of you-know-who than Martin Luther ever made and only 30 years of separation.
Could you run through Verifiability not Truth once more?
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QUOTE(dtobias @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 9:50pm)
QUOTE(GlassBeadGame @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 2:17pm)
Of course there is another path. A critic can be indifferent to the survival of Wikipedia altogether. He can uphold external expectations, standards and practices. Measure Wikipedia against these and let Wikipedia continued existence depend on its ability to make a satisfactory adjustment to external realities, like every other website, charity or entity of any kind.
Somebody (I forget who) once said "A reasonable man adjusts to the outside world. An unreasonable man tries to get the outside world to adjust to him. All progress is due to unreasonable men."
Which goes to show that if you live your life by quoting shallow, erroneous epithets, you will make little progress yourself. That particular quotation bears less scrutiny than usual.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 2:39pm)
But, realistically speaking, I doubt this will happen just as a result of official action. The WMF will insist only on "taking down" whatever the authorities instruct them to take down. This avoids all the necessity of setting Wikipedia up as a proper polity. If the FBI or any other entity suggests that they set up processes for self-monitoring and taking down, they will push back hard, and if forced, they will try to make the processes as lightweight as possible, and tell the contributors that the government has ordered them to do this; meanwhile, Wikipedia's true believers will howl censorship at the tops of their lungs, and probably practice all sorts of "civil disobedience." In other words, the opposite of transparency, meaningful democracy, and more responsible governance.
Unfortunately, this is all too likely. It has long been my observation that the Frei Kultur Kinder that run Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites love nothing better than crawling up on a cross and playing at martyrs. They will undoubtedly claim to be "political prisoners" or "prisoners of conscience" in the unlikely event any are held in custody, or people "persecuted for their beliefs" or "prosecuted for 'thoughtcrime'" if the US Government otherwise takes action. The Government may change their behavior to a limited degree, but it cannot and will not change the mindset and attitudes of the wikipediots.
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QUOTE(Cedric @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 5:11pm)
It has long been my observation that the Frei Kultur Kinder that run Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites love nothing better than crawling up on a cross and playing at martyrs. They will undoubtedly claim to be "political prisoners" or "prisoners of conscience" in the unlikely event any are held in custody, or people "persecuted for their beliefs" or "prosecuted for 'thoughtcrime'" if the US Government otherwise takes action. The Government may change their behavior to a limited degree, but it cannot and will not change the mindset and attitudes of the wikipediots.
Fortunately, those people are not, or at least should not be, your primary target. Lasting success in defeating the WikiMonster is to be had by interfering with Wikipedia's ongoing ability to do two things: recruit volunteers and raise money.
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QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 5:17pm)
QUOTE(Cedric @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 5:11pm)
It has long been my observation that the Frei Kultur Kinder that run Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia sites love nothing better than crawling up on a cross and playing at martyrs. They will undoubtedly claim to be "political prisoners" or "prisoners of conscience" in the unlikely event any are held in custody, or people "persecuted for their beliefs" or "prosecuted for 'thoughtcrime'" if the US Government otherwise takes action. The Government may change their behavior to a limited degree, but it cannot and will not change the mindset and attitudes of the wikipediots.
Fortunately, those people are not, or at least should not be, your primary target. Lasting success in defeating the WikiMonster is to be had by interfering with Wikipedia's ongoing ability to do two things: recruit volunteers and raise money.
Actually, I agree with this. Still, these wiki-zealots are playing a key role in destroying Wikipedia's reputation, or "brand" if you will, and destroying that inflated and quite undeserved reputation is in turn key to Hastening The Day!™
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 4:26pm)
Are you aware of the flap along those very lines when Jimbo threatened to shut down Wikiversity over projects there that undertook to examine the ethical shortcomings of Wikipedia? Jimbo expressly declared course materials on managerial ethics to be "beyond the scope" of WMF-sponsored projects.
No, I wasn't aware of that. If it's as you describe it, well--what a piece of work. One thing that neither Wales nor the other management of Wikipedia understands is the importance of the freedom of criticizing management, if the project is going to be an "open society." But then, I guess Wales knows this but would glibly deny that it is an "open society," in the same way that Wikipedians glibly and cynically deny that they have a democracy. Of course, the very nature of an "open source encyclopedia" demands that it be governed democratically.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 7:10pm)
Of course, the very nature of an "open source encyclopedia" demands that it be governed democratically.
But Wikipedia has never been governed democratically: there has never been any semblance of obtaining informed consent from the electorate for any action, nor is there is even any coherent notion of a defined electorate.
When you ran Wikipedia in the early days, did you make any effort to establish the underpinnings of democratic governance within Wikipedia's community? If so, what happened that cause those efforts to fail? If not, why not?
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 2:35am)
I haven't looked into the literature on this, but I believe there is some evidence that childhood traumas such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual abuse are a factor in the emergence of Cluster B personality disorders in adulthood.
Um...yeah, that's pretty well accepted by alot of folks in the fields of psychiatry and psychology (me included). How does that relate to this discussion? Cas
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Not only is Wikipedia not governed democratically, the governance model of Wikipedia is so primitive and anachronistic that it predates all recognized models of community governance since the dawn of civilization.
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QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 8:20pm)
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 7:10pm)
Of course, the very nature of an "open source encyclopedia" demands that it be governed democratically.
But Wikipedia has never been governed democratically: there has never been any semblance of obtaining informed consent from the electorate for any action, nor is there is even any coherent notion of a defined electorate.
When you ran Wikipedia in the early days, did you make any effort to establish the underpinnings of democratic governance within Wikipedia's community? If so, what happened that cause those efforts to fail? If not, why not?
You're right, and that's a fair question, actually. I might elaborate more later, but at that time, I admit that I didn't understand the importance of governance issues. I thought it was just an encyclopedia project; I didn't appreciate how important community governance issues were going to be. By the end of my time at the project I had finally come around to the view that it was important for the project to adopt a sort of community charter. Jimmy Wales was always opposed to this. With Citizendium I gave this issue a great deal more thought. You can read more of how I was basically flogged into this view in "The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia" on Slashdot.
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QUOTE(Casliber @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 5:37pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 2:35am)
I haven't looked into the literature on this, but I believe there is some evidence that childhood traumas such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual abuse are a factor in the emergence of Cluster B personality disorders in adulthood.
Um...yeah, that's pretty well accepted by alot of folks in the fields of psychiatry and psychology (me included). How does that relate to this discussion? Cas
I don't know, but the reference to Cluster F disorders was worth it all.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 7:39pm)
@dogbiscuit--I understand, and I'd love to talk about it, but I don't really want to give people like Anthony the satisfaction of preening over his response to whatever I say.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 1:25am)
what Wikipedia and WMF does daily with people's reputations and with respect to the law is serious as well. They have acted outside of the law and basic moral standards on too many occasions, and it's time they were held responsible for this.
It gives me no pleasure at all to say this, but it seems necessary for the law to act in order to rein in their most egregious abuses.
Welcome and thank you for taking these matters seriously.
You are probably the only person in the world at this point who is able to reach and wake up the kind of people we need to in order to stop or change this abuse. But I think your continued support and involvement will hasten the process.
Law is complex, much moreso than public opinion. Public opinion is much easier to create and its effects can be even further reaching. To be honest, I have little faith in the law and I have far more faith in the effects of separating parasites from their source of financial support by which, specifically, I mean the big trusts and foundation who have been laying down considerable funds based on the chimeras presented by the Mediawiki Foundation.
I would say a few formal letters (not emails) to the boards of those foundations would start a far reaching effect. There is no point speaking to foundation whose record of irresponsibility, indulgence and hypocrisy is without doubt (see the immediate protection of Erik Moeller's biography by Tracy E. Walker, aka Killerchihuahua). You need to speak to the responsible parties.
QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 3:21pm)
The interesting thing is that Larry's current action is more likely to effect long-term change in Wikipedia than anything anyone else has done. If he's successful in getting Wikipedia put on school filter lists as a "pornography" site (which appears to be one of his goals in this action), that'll significantly cut them off of one of their major recruitment pools for countervandalism patrollers.
Wikipedia's death is most likely to occur when they can no longer recruit enough countervandalism patrollers to effectively combat the continuing onslaught of petty (and not-so-petty) vandals, and the site essentially dissolves into a pile of undifferentiated spam and graffiti.
Hampering their access to the teen and preteen crowd is almost certain to hasten the day.
I wholly and entirely support Sanger's actions. Given the cult-like nature of the Wikipedia, this is nothing else but typical cult-like recruitment done the world over by similar cult religions. If he is successful, these actions, or let them be a campaign, will be his greatest achievements.
I have been looking into Interpol's position and they might be much more useful than the FBI which is bound by some of the morer ludicrous applications of the First Amendment (which would have the Founding Fathers turning in their graves).
It would seem that other nations cut a far clearer line and, free from the overbearing weight of the pornographic industry in the USA and its financial interests, are more free to act ... info@interpol.int.
Larry appears to have attempted a stab at the heart of the Pornopedia. If I was to suggest an additional strategy, it would be to start cut away - internationally - at the edges of the Imperial Wikipedian Beast, in other countries who have clearer lines on public decency. Attempt change where the Mediawiki Foundation is less well funded.
Some may think that I am joking or being ridiculous to make such statements re "cult" but I am not. Of all of the models I have looked at, 'the Wikipedia as a cult in development' is the closest social modeling I can find.
And, ditto, we see cults, new religious movements to give them their politically correct name, deliberately and specifically target the same demographic groups as the Wikipedia, operate on the same pyramidic model and with the same hyperbolic claims of purpose. Jimbo is just like another guru who gets to keep the money (his enlightenment talk fees) and now and again get to poke an adherent it seems.
Jimmy Wales is not the rock star he likes to think of, he is an irresponsible cult leader.
Looking at the list of most viewed pages on the Wikipedia (what was it, 47 out of 50 being porn ... and that just being the tip of the iceberg), I have to ask whether the amateur hard core porn, and the ability to upload it, is part of the reward stimulus to keep adherents addicted along with the rushes of Wiki-warfare.
One could easily argue that it was a bizarre sexual perversion in itself.
Imagine individuals who went sneaking about public and school libraries slipping photographs of themselves masturbating, ejaculating, exposing their lovers' post-coital sexual organs or acting out S&M scenes under the guise it was "educational" for the children who came across it.
Imagine individuals taking an established publication such as the Bible or Britannica and persistently inserting text across it to support pedophiliac or pederastic preferences or attempting to "normalise" extreme sexual behavior.
In essence, they are nothing more than "flashers" ... sex pervs. They justifying themselves under the guise of managing bit of trivia scrapped off Google. The Wikipedia is their playground and access point to young minds.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 7:10pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 4:26pm)
Are you aware of the flap along those very lines when Jimbo threatened to shut down Wikiversity over projects there that undertook to examine the ethical shortcomings of Wikipedia? Jimbo expressly declared course materials on managerial ethics to be "beyond the scope" of WMF-sponsored projects.
No, I wasn't aware of that. If it's as you describe it, well--what a piece of work. One thing that neither Wales nor the other management of Wikipedia understands is the importance of the freedom of criticizing management, if the project is going to be an "open society." But then, I guess Wales knows this but would glibly deny that it is an "open society," in the same way that Wikipedians glibly and cynically deny that they have a democracy. Of course, the very nature of an "open source encyclopedia" demands that it be governed democratically.
Internal democracy with no voice for stakeholders "outside" the community is phony and self-absorbed. Better to challenge the assumptions of "open source" and place more authority and decision making in the hands of a normal functioning non-profit board of directors. Then broaden the scope of the representation found there to include BLP victims, child advocates, parents, experts and other currently unrepresented stakeholders.
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 8:41pm)
QUOTE(Casliber @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 5:37pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 2:35am)
I haven't looked into the literature on this, but I believe there is some evidence that childhood traumas such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual abuse are a factor in the emergence of Cluster B personality disorders in adulthood.
Um...yeah, that's pretty well accepted by alot of folks in the fields of psychiatry and psychology (me included). How does that relate to this discussion? Cas
I don't know, but the reference to Cluster F disorders was worth it all.
No doubt, but I was actually picking up on the quotes in Greg's post just above mine.
Specifically this quote...
QUOTE(From Greg's post #135 @ above.)
Interview with Ann Burgess, professor of nursing, University of Pennsylvania, 15 January 1997. "Pornography - Victims and Perpetrators," Symposium on Media Violence & Pornography, Proceedings Resource Book and Research Guide, ed. D. Scott (1984). * ...pornography short-circuits and/or distorts the normal personality development process and supplies misinformation about a child's sexuality, sense of self, and body that leaves the child confused, changed, and damaged.
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QUOTE(Cock-up-over-conspiracy @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 8:44pm)
I would say a few formal letters (not emails) to the boards of those foundations would start a far reaching effect. There is no point speaking to foundation whose record of irresponsibility, indulgence and hypocrisy is without doubt (see the immediate protection of Erik Moeller's biography by Tracy E. Walker, aka Killerchihuahua). You need to speak to the responsible parties.
You know, I honestly hadn't even thought of that, not even once. I'll have to think about that. But what you go on to describe sounds like a pretty unremunerative career, not to mention stressful and risky. I hate to disappoint you but it's unlikely that I will go to all that trouble. I don't have the soul of an Ahab or Javert. Socrates is more my style. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) Which is fun to consider, considering that, I suddenly recall, Jimmy Wales once declared to me that he hated Socrates. That always struck me as being a very strange thing to say.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 9:16pm)
I don't have the soul of an Ahab or Javert. Socrates is more my style. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) Which is fun to consider, considering that, I suddenly recall, Jimmy Wales once declared to me that he hated Socrates. That always struck me as being a very strange thing to say.
That's a very interesting disclosure, Larry. I'm also a big fan of Socrates. I routinely use the Maieutic Method of Socrates in my role as a science educator. I suspect Wales would classify Socrates as a "troll" (i.e. someone who asks good questions that the person being questioned doesn't want to have to answer).
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QUOTE(Ottava @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 2:24pm)
I answered that no, because even if a majority says the porn is "educational", they can't honestly believe it. We do not need 100+ photos of the same sexual position or whatever.
It is just an amateur porn host and the proponents are probably okay with that.
I was doing some homework about other avenues and came up with Circamp who have an well establish network of partners. I have not looked into far more marginal areas for the Mediawiki, such as Africa and Islamic nations, but I suspect progress would be far more easy in those areas. This needs to be an international campaign as it is having an international affect on children's psyche.
National Criminal Investigation Service att: CIRCAMP PO BOX 8163 Dep. Oslo N-0035 Norway
One of the obstacles I see is that the Pornopedia is just not being obviously "bad" enough and their "crimes" are just a little too subtle to gain the attention of law enforcement agencies. Where is the "victim"?
Again, harking back to what I wrote above, their use of children as administrators, and perversion of what is education and educational, is more akin to the child abuse which goes on in religious cult movements. I am thinking along the lines of the Children of God who were notorious for their "flirty fishing", child abuse and incest pornography, Scientology or the Brahma Kumaris, who pretend to be a "University" and marry 1,000s of young Indian girls off to their spirit guide in order to become unpaid servants for life (they take their dowries off them).
Again, I am attempting to portray this relationship loosely ... but I think the key to understanding the Wikipedia is seeing from the cultic religious model in which all the other minor 'sins' fall into place much more easily.
There is a victim, it is society, but the "crime" so far is more on the lines of corrupting public morals. There are "educational crimes" being carried on, see our discussions about the Wikipedia as an analogue for real academia, understanding or knowledge but those will hardly register with Interplod.
And so, 'the battle' is really to fought elsewhere. It would be a mistake to presume or rely on the FBI arriving on a white stallion to save us. Their part is really only in gaining the attention of the Foundation and other responsible parties such as the foundations. The fight is more in the realm of the public perception of the Wikipedia and the public sorely needs education about what is really going on.
They have a well paid PR working for them ... Sue Gardner ... we don't yet.
And Guru Jimbo uniquely seems to exist by creaming off the five figured speaking fees and corporate endorsements, ostensibly doing PR for them but, in fact, doing PR for himself ... in order to reap the benefits personally. Living off the wealth created by unpaid laborers at the Pee-dia ... and the underpaided laborers of the corporations which pay him ridiculous sums for ridiculous commentary.
His only circus act seems to be doing the rounds of local groups and conferences keeping the plates excited and spinning.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 1:25am)
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 9:16pm)
I don't have the soul of an Ahab or Javert. Socrates is more my style. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) Which is fun to consider, considering that, I suddenly recall, Jimmy Wales once declared to me that he hated Socrates. That always struck me as being a very strange thing to say.
That's a very interesting disclosure, Larry. I'm also a big fan of Socrates. I routinely use the Maieutic Method of Socrates in my role as a science educator. I suspect Wales would classify Socrates as a "troll" (i.e. someone who asks good questions that the person being questioned doesn't want to have to answer).
"troll" used to be Jimbo's favorite response to anyone asking a tough question.
After you left, Larry, Jimbo and Danny set up a secret hidden chat room for administrators (but only their buddies were invited. It took a year hell raising for all administrators to be let in). Here's Jimbo in the sooper secrete meeting room calling on his sycophants to re-work your Wikipedia biography. Note the question from 'geniice' asking for sources that describe Jimbo as the sole founder; "jwales it's what the sources that we can use tell us". Response from Jimbo; "geniice, please don't troll me right now, ok?"
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 11:02am)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 8:41pm)
QUOTE(Casliber @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 5:37pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 2:35am)
I haven't looked into the literature on this, but I believe there is some evidence that childhood traumas such as physical abuse, emotional abuse, verbal abuse, and sexual abuse are a factor in the emergence of Cluster B personality disorders in adulthood.
Um...yeah, that's pretty well accepted by alot of folks in the fields of psychiatry and psychology (me included). How does that relate to this discussion? Cas
I don't know, but the reference to Cluster F disorders was worth it all.
No doubt, but I was actually picking up on the quotes in Greg's post just above mine.
Specifically this quote...
QUOTE(From Greg's post #135 @ above.)
Interview with Ann Burgess, professor of nursing, University of Pennsylvania, 15 January 1997. "Pornography - Victims and Perpetrators," Symposium on Media Violence & Pornography, Proceedings Resource Book and Research Guide, ed. D. Scott (1984). * ...pornography short-circuits and/or distorts the normal personality development process and supplies misinformation about a child's sexuality, sense of self, and body that leaves the child confused, changed, and damaged.
Ah, okay, gotcha now. Yeah, difficult area to research as alot of confounding variables (WRT pornography etc.). Cas
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Actually, I was less intrigued by the prominence of pornographic content on WP than by the prominence of so many dominant characters exhibiting Cluster B characteristics. It occurs to me the apparent correlation may not be accidental.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 8:25pm)
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 9:16pm)
I don't have the soul of an Ahab or Javert. Socrates is more my style. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) Which is fun to consider, considering that, I suddenly recall, Jimmy Wales once declared to me that he hated Socrates. That always struck me as being a very strange thing to say.
That's a very interesting disclosure, Larry. I'm also a big fan of Socrates. I routinely use the Maieutic Method of Socrates in my role as a science educator. I suspect Wales would classify Socrates as a "troll" (i.e. someone who asks good questions that the person being questioned doesn't want to have to answer).
Feh! He probably hates Bill & Ted as well. I cannot imagine that "Be excellent to each other" fits in very well with the objectivist "philosophy".
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 6:16pm)
You know, I honestly hadn't even thought of that, not even once. I'll have to think about that. But what you go on to describe sounds like a pretty unremunerative career, not to mention stressful and risky. I hate to disappoint you but it's unlikely that I will go to all that trouble. I don't have the soul of an Ahab or Javert. Socrates is more my style. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wink.gif) Which is fun to consider, considering that, I suddenly recall, Jimmy Wales once declared to me that he hated Socrates. That always struck me as being a very strange thing to say.
Well, you're not up on your Ayn Rand, then. Aristotle is in, Plato and his teacher Socrates are out.
Besides, do you think that if Wales or Rand were feeling slow poisonous paralysis creep up their legs and knew they only had 5 minutes to live, that they'd worry about returning somebody's borrowed chicken? (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/confused.gif)
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 2:01am)
Actually, I was less intrigued by the prominence of pornographic content on WP than by the prominence of so many dominant characters exhibiting Cluster B characteristics. It occurs to me the apparent correlation may not be accidental.
Arguably, the latter is more damaging on the social development of children and young people.
Porn tends to be passive. It does not interact with you, you have to go and interact with it. I think it has a very imbalancing effect on young minds and, overall, a negative and wasteful effect on society but it cannot go out of its way to mess with you, mentally engage with you and work to reshape your behavior and thought patterns in the way that real abusive individuals can.
The Wikipedia has become a playground for such individuals in which naive victims are baited, ensnared and preyed upon. It is not a healthy place for children to be. The hard core amateur porn aspect is an easier way of gaining responsible individuals and entity's attention and communicating all this, and the values the Mediawiki Foundation are really promoting.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 7:10pm)
No, I wasn't aware of that. If it's as you describe it, well--what a piece of work.
To be fair, from their perspective (and Jimbo's in particular), it probably looked like "the usual suspects are at it again," since there were various WR members involved.
This is one of those instances where a lengthy WR blog post on the subject by yours truly might actually be the less time-consuming way of familiarizing yourself with the incident (usually it's the other way around!)...
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While I also applaud Dr. Sanger's work here in cleaning up Wikipedia's act (and welcome to the Review, Dr. Sanger), I wonder if he realizes just how far and how deep these "laissez-faire" attitudes towards children's images and porn are prevalent on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's "boy" article contains sexualized content and nude photos. Although the nude "art" gallery has been taken out of the article, out of four photos, two are of nude or semi-nude boys and it's impossible to get them taken out because "Wikipedia is not censored"...In addition, under "see also" there is a link to "pederasty".
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QUOTE(Cock-up-over-conspiracy @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 11:17pm)
The Wikipedia has become a playground for such individuals in which naive victims are baited, ensnared and preyed upon. It is not a healthy place for children to be.
Since I'm on a Semiotics jag today, let me point out a curious Greek word associated with baiting, ensnaring and trapping an unsuspecting prey. The word is skandalon -- literally the stick that holds the bait in a baited trap. From that word, we get "scandal" and "slander" -- the two most problematic kinds of "bait" that Wikipedians perennially stumble over.
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QUOTE(Lar @ Mon 3rd May 2010, 9:43pm)
Quite so, unfortunately. The discussion on Commons is instructive: Commons:Commons_talk:Sexual_content/April_2010 ... lots of fighting tooth and nail at the very idea that Commons ought to do more than the law requires and try to track ages and model releases. note the consistent use of "prudery" and "censorship" as memes for attack.
I have commented, but it is not exactly a vigorous discussion, is it? Barely half a dozen people participating there. Most of it is just Privatemusings and Roux.
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QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 1:54pm)
For another illustration of community discussion regarding pornographic images, see the discussion concerning "Stan Spanker's" uploads here.
The pornography is one thing. The eroticism of children is quite another.
As far as I'm concerned, pornographic images between consenting adults are fine with me. Nude photos and BSDM information in the boy (T-H-L-K-D) article are not.
Whether or not pornographic images should be in an encyclopedia is another discussion, IMO.
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QUOTE(the fieryangel @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:11pm)
QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 1:54pm)
For another illustration of community discussion regarding pornographic images, see the discussion concerning "Stan Spanker's" uploads here.
The pornography is one thing. The eroticism of children is quite another.
As far as I'm concerned, pornographic images between consenting adults are fine with me. Nude photos and BSDM information in the boy (T-H-L-K-D) article are not.
Whether or not pornographic images should be in an encyclopedia is another discussion, IMO.
I don't have a problem with pornographic images either. But hosting them without a tagging system that allows users and organisation to opt out of viewing them seems incompatible with an educational project.
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QUOTE(the fieryangel @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:47am)
While I also applaud Dr. Sanger's work here in cleaning up Wikipedia's act (and welcome to the Review, Dr. Sanger), I wonder if he realizes just how far and how deep these "laissez-faire" attitudes towards children's images and porn are prevalent on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's "boy" article contains sexualized content and nude photos. Although the nude "art" gallery has been taken out of the article, out of four photos, two are of nude or semi-nude boys and it's impossible to get them taken out because "Wikipedia is not censored"...In addition, under "see also" there is a link to "pederasty".
...and there's plenty more where that comes from...
Yes, the one or two areas identified on commons only scratches the surface. Add to all of this sexually charged material depicting children and the huge volume of sexually explicit material made available to children that depicts adult sex acts and fetishes. Much of this material would certainly constitute obscenity under the community standards in many jurisdictions. Then again add to this the most offensive content not viewable by the public but available to hundreds and hundreds of child admins.
Then finally consider the worst danger of all. Not content but the opportunity Wikipedia presents for outright predation. WP provides a context for sustained interaction between adults and children. This context is ideal for forging relations emphasizing the "specialness" "talent" and "maturity" of the child by an adult seeking to flatter and then exploit. The use of pseudonyms provide a false sense of intimacy and comfort as well as a screen for the predator. WP provides numerous attractive nuisances in articles of interest to children to stage this interaction. It also provides a vehicle for private contact in the form of email not viewable by anyone other than the correspondents. Wikipedia even goes so far as to sponsor real life meet-ups in which participants, both adult and child are encourage to meet in relaxed atmospheres. All of this is done with no parental consent or disclosure. In fact Wikipedians have actively solicited schools to encourage child participation without giving any disclosure of the content or risks presented. A twelve year old child visiting the website of his breakfast cereal is protected form commercial exploitation by screening, registration and parental consent. No child protective measures at all are present on Wikipedia with its pornographic content, pro-pedophile editors and an unsupervised environment of adult/child interaction.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:31pm)
Let me put it another way... how many 16-year-olds do you think work on the staff of Playboy or Penthouse?
Surely the simplest solution should be that while Commons and Wikipedia host explicitly pornographic images like those uploaded by Stan Spanker, their sites should be 18-rated just like any other site hosting pornography. To be honest, I don't quite understand why they're not.
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QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 10:38am)
QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:31pm)
Let me put it another way... how many 16-year-olds do you think work on the staff of Playboy or Penthouse?
Surely the simplest solution should be that while Commons and Wikipedia host explicitly pornographic images like those uploaded by Stan Spanker, their sites should be 18-rated just like any other site hosting pornography. To be honest, I don't quite understand why they're not.
But why? These are EDUCATIONAL! I know this because they are being hosted by a 501-c-3 tax-exempt educational charity!
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:43pm)
QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 10:38am)
QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:31pm)
Let me put it another way... how many 16-year-olds do you think work on the staff of Playboy or Penthouse?
Surely the simplest solution should be that while Commons and Wikipedia host explicitly pornographic images like those uploaded by Stan Spanker, their sites should be 18-rated just like any other site hosting pornography. To be honest, I don't quite understand why they're not.
But why? These are EDUCATIONAL! I know this because they are being hosted by a 501-c-3 tax-exempt educational charity!
Well, pornography is pornography. The servers are in the US, right? Isn't there a governmental body in the US that regulates websites and requires them to carry age warnings if they host pornographic content?
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QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 9:46am)
Well, pornography is pornography. The servers are in the US, right? Isn't there a governmental body in the US that regulates websites and requires them to carry age warnings if they host pornographic content?
Of course not. We have this pesky thing called free speech here.
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QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:03pm)
QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 9:46am)
Well, pornography is pornography. The servers are in the US, right? Isn't there a governmental body in the US that regulates websites and requires them to carry age warnings if they host pornographic content?
Of course not. We have this pesky thing called free speech here.
I've heard of it. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) But does that mean that US-based porn sites displaying an age warning do so voluntarily?
According to the Wikipedia article on the Children's Internet Protection Act, US schools and libraries using E-Rate discounts have to operate "a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with Internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors..."
Does that mean that if they provide access to Commons or Wikipedia from their computers, they endanger their entitlement to the discount?
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QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 10:15am)
I've heard of it. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) But does that mean that US-based porn sites displaying an age warning do so voluntarily?
No law specifically requires them to display such warnings. Most of them do it so that if they are charged with pandering, they can respond with "But they told me they were over 18, and I had no reason to disbelieve them", which is probably enough to establish that they did not knowingly contribute to the delinquency of a minor, or whatever the statute is in the jurisdiction in question. Such warnings are a good idea in the sense of avoiding criminal liability, but required? Nope, purely voluntary.
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QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:22pm)
QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 10:15am)
I've heard of it. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) But does that mean that US-based porn sites displaying an age warning do so voluntarily?
No law specifically requires them to display such warnings. Most of them do it so that if they are charged with pandering, they can respond with "But they told me they were over 18, and I had no reason to disbelieve them", which is probably enough to establish that they did not knowingly contribute to the delinquency of a minor, or whatever the statute is in the jurisdiction in question. Such warnings are a good idea in the sense of avoiding criminal liability, but required? Nope, purely voluntary.
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All, if you really want to expose this nest of vermin to the light of day, then compile all the research for that major journalistic expose in one nice tidy package. Do the journalist's research for him (or her). But it is important exactly how to do this. I think wikitruth.info has made a stab, but the sheer quantity of information on that site, and the fact that it's more than just a few pages, greatly dilutes its potential impact. So I'm going to share with you all some views on how I think this would best be done.
A very rough example of what I am about to describe can be found here.
Host it on a static web page, not a wiki. Don't allow commenting on it. Avoid putting it on a website associated with Wikipedia critics (so, sorry, not wikipediareview.com). Let the document speak for itself.
Make it a giant web page full of links. Get webcite copies of absolutely everything, or you'll regret it.
Do not develop this document openly (maybe use a password-protected Google Doc), so that your research is unimpeded.
When you do post it, post the final draft, beautifully edited in every respect. If you plan to get outside commentary before posting it, do so before you post it publicly.
An absolute rule for this page is to avoid all straightforward insults, sarcasm, snark, cleverness, etc. Make it as objective and fact-stating as possible. A tone of sober seriousness, coupled with no-nonsense conciseness, will greatly increase its impact.
In addition, don't be needlessly argumentative. You can briefly sum up arguments (sometimes, they're very important to understanding what's going on), but don't elaborate. The point of the exercise is not to write the essay, it is to supply the research for it. Let people draw their own conclusions; the evidence speaks for itself.
But again, in some cases, stating arguments (briefly!) is crucial. Simply listing a bunch of porn images, for example, is going to make many people shrug and scoff. It becomes more relevant if you point out, as you do here, that underaged Wikipedia editors and administrators are regularly exposed to such material, or that school districts do not all filter Wikipedia.
Check and double-check that your summaries of the evidence are precisely correct, and that there is as little room for misinterpreting or twisting your words as possible. Again, it must be possible for everyone reading this document to view it as an objective summary of the facts. In such a summary, it is acceptable to make a few short arguments, to contextualize why we should care about something, but this is a summary of evidence, not a legal brief or essay.
Link to original sources wherever possible. Don't link to Wikipedia Review discussions of the evidence, link to the evidence itself. This is a compilation of the evidence and what it indicates, that's all.
As to how it all might be organized, I suggest by theme, then date, rather than by date with no attention to theme. Of course, if you could do both and interlink the two--that would be the best of all--but the document might be hard to develop and maintain. So, for example, a person who wanted to know all the, say, porn connections of Wikipedia would have that all in one place; someone who wanted to know all of Jimmy Wales' curious behavior, that again would be in one place. Note, if you do go with a thematic presentation, some links might need to be filed under multiple themes and with different descriptions. But I can certainly see how a straightforward timeline would be very impactful as well.
An important part of this document, which I can imagine being unfortunately overlooked, would be some of the actual present contents of Wikipedia and related projects. This would include not just category pages filled with smut (for example) but also the policy pages that permit it and the talk pages that reject challenges to it.
In fact, let's get our cards out on the table here. Consider all the different kinds of source material: the present contents of Wikimedia pages, including text, images, and maybe other file types; pages in the history or in archived pages, hidden away; pages on other wikis, such as wikitruth.info and wikisposure.com; news reports; some internet discussions, such as on Kuro5hin; books and articles; quite possibly, some videos on YouTube or elsewhere; etc.
Then consider the different kinds of information you want. There are, of course, the famous wikiscandals, of which BLP messes would be a leading type, but by means not the only one; then there's Jimmy Wales' various foibles; there is the resistance of Wikimedia management to all sorts of perfectly legitimate criticism, and various attempts to cover things up; there is the growing hardcore porn problem; the under-reported Wikipedophilia problem; etc.
It is important to be very creative in choosing themes to research, but it's also important not to have anything petty. For example, you all get a laugh out of Angela Beesley's Wikilove poster, but from my point of view and that of many people, this is just silly or amusing, not anything to be embarrassed about. I don't know Angela or Tim Starling personally but as far as I can tell, they are some of the few I know of managing the project who seem not to be totally bonkers. My point is that you must not take cheap shots. People who are not already on your side will pick up on the attitude and be disposed against you.
You are certainly the people to compile such a document. You seem to be veritable experts on Wikipedia scandals and flaws.
By the way, it is totally possible to go overboard with this. Depending on who does this and how much energy you all have, you might end up going beyond a massive compendium of Wikiscandal, to something totally overwhelming. It would be a tremendous mistake to put this on more than one page, I feel. It should be one page, and a honking big one, but one that seems very well-organized, navigable, and wade-in-able. If you feel that you really *must* include some scandal, but there are already a dozen others that are 10 times worse, then simply classify the also-rans and make brief links to them, without all the explanation you reserve for things like Essjay or the Spanking Wikia. By all means, make a fairly exhaustive compilation of the other scandals, but focus on the big ones.
In other words, don't be tedious. Use footnotes or links with pop-up text or something, I don't know. You might want to put a total word count limit on the whole thing. I'm not sure what it should be--maybe 10,000 words, definitely not more than 20,000 words.
Make things as easy as you can for the researcher. If you are linking to a long page and there's no easy way to link straight to the text, then say, "search on the page for ...". Include internal anchor links on the page.
You might even think of putting this thing on its own domain. A single domain, a single page, a single purpose--to expose the management practices of most irresponsible top-10 website online.
To do this right, as I've described it, would probably take a committed group of people months to complete. But I think it would be worth the effort.
Then...send it to all media (do a press release), TechCrunch, Slashdot, and big bloggers, get everybody on wikipediareview.com to send links to everybody they know...and stand back.
P.S. considering that you'll be linking to pornographic images, better put in one of those "Are you 18?" prompts before allowing access to the page.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:43pm)
All, if you really want to expose this nest of vermin to the light of day, then compile all the research for that major journalistic expose in one nice tidy package. Do the journalist's research for him (or her). But it is important exactly how to do this. I think wikitruth.info has made a stab, but the sheer quantity of information on that site, and the fact that it's more than just a few pages, greatly dilutes its potential impact. So I'm going to share with you all some views on how I think this would best be done.
A very rough example of what I am about to describe can be found here.
I think that you probably just figured out exactly how big this problem actually is...
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QUOTE(Kelly Martin @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:22pm)
QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 10:15am)
I've heard of it. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/biggrin.gif) But does that mean that US-based porn sites displaying an age warning do so voluntarily?
No law specifically requires them to display such warnings. Most of them do it so that if they are charged with pandering, they can respond with "But they told me they were over 18, and I had no reason to disbelieve them", which is probably enough to establish that they did not knowingly contribute to the delinquency of a minor, or whatever the statute is in the jurisdiction in question. Such warnings are a good idea in the sense of avoiding criminal liability, but required? Nope, purely voluntary.
to protect children and adolescents in Germany from any media which might contain harmful or dangerous contents. This work is authorized by the "Youth Protection Law" (Jugendschutzgesetz - JuSchG). Media monitored by us are, among others: videos, DVDs, computer games, audio records and CDs, print media and internet sites.
QUOTE
If an object is obviously harmful to minors, it will be put on the index in a simplified act, requiring a unanimous vote, executed by a board of 3 representatives of the groups mentioned above (§ 23 I JuSchG). In case of a severe danger to minors, the object does not need to be put on the "index"; the distribution restrictions will be effective regardless (§ 15 II JuSchG). Media with pornographic content are regularly considered to be obviously and severely harmful to minors. Pornography itself is defined by the German High Court as a presentation of sexuality that is not connected to any kind of psychologically motivated human relationship and which glorifies sexual satisfaction as the only reason for human existence, often accompanied by grossly depicted genitals. Distributing those objects to minors is illegal (§ 15 I and III-VI JuSchG) and will be punished by law (§ 27 JuSchG). In addition, the German penal code (Strafgesetzbuch - StGB) penalizes the dissemination of pornographic content (§ 184 StGB). Completely prohibited - even among people of legal age - are the depictions of sexual acts involving children, animals or violence. Similar regulations prohibit media with explicitly violent content. The spreading of pornographic content and other harmful media via the internet is a criminal offence under German jurisdiction. A pornographic content on the internet is legal only if technical measures prohibit minors from getting access to the object (AVS = Age Verification System or Adult-Check-System).
They clearly speak English there; a letter with a few links to Commons media by Stan Spanker & Co. might get their attention.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Tue 4th May 2010, 11:53am)
Baby steps!
There are baby steps everywhere. Some are to be found in forum threads here. Some are to be found in selected essays on the W-R Editorial pages. Some are to be found on Google Knol. Some are to be found at academic sites (like P2P and FirstMonday). Some are to be found on personal blogs and academic blogs. Some are to be found in graduate level theses and peer-reviewed journals. Some are to be found in the mainstream press.
What I think is needed is a full-blown comic opera or musical comedy.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:00pm)
What I think is needed is a full-blown comic opera or musical comedy.
...well, isn't that what we're in the processing of doing already?
I agree with Dr. Sanger: if there is any hope at all of the press picking this up, it has to be made easy for them. Those who have pitched stories to Cade Metz and others in the press will understand what I'm talking about here.
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QUOTE(the fieryangel @ Tue 4th May 2010, 12:06pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:00pm)
What I think is needed is a full-blown comic opera or musical comedy.
...well, isn't that what we're in the processing of doing already?
Are we? I've done my best to write the lyrics to utterly atrocious song parodies. But (as you well know) I have no musical talent to speak of (and certainly none to sing of).
In any event, I think that Somey and Milton Roe are the site's two most talented writers, and if anyone here is capable of packaging something that a mainstream journalist could use, it would be either (or both) of them
Larry, once again, we've been sucking these eggs a LONG time. You may have invented a key suggestion behind this mess, but that doesn't mean you've been watching the consequences of it very closely. And there are yet more keys involved in making it pathological. A wiki is simply a type of data-base, inherrently neither good nor bad. But it puts office politics on steroids, and when set up with little backchannels, microphones, and powerplays, it can be quite Stalin-esqe (or Orwellian). We get it.
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What Larry has admitted is that he didn't pay enough attention to questions of community governance. As many of you know, I've been very noisy on the subject of governance models. I even have a peer-reviewed publication or two on the subject. I don't fault Larry for overlooking the issue of community governance models. How was he to know?
But it's also not clear to me how to do anything about the problem of dysfunctional governance (on WP or anywhere else in human society) beyond writing a peer-reviewed analysis of the problem and pointing to some small demonstrations of an alternative governance model.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:14pm)
In any event, I think that Somey and Milton Roe are the site's two most talented writers, and if anyone here is capable of packaging something that a mainstream journalist could use, it would be either (or both) of them
...um, I seem to believe that Horsey does exactly that sort of thing for his living...but you probably forgot that?
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I believe Mr. Sanger has done us all a great service with his reporting to law enforcement his concerns about the pornographic depiction of children hosted by WMF. Because of his public profile as a founder of Wikipedia his concerns carry significant weight and have already garnered mainstream media attention. I don't expect him be aware of, or even concerned about every issue we have discussed on this forum. I, like some others here, are happy to have him here and I'm trying to make a few points about Wikipedia irresponsibility to him because it is likely that in the near future he will have occasion to use the information, should he find it helpful, in further discussion with the authorities and media.
It appears that Mr. Sanger is spending as much time reading our posts as saying what he wants to say. I couldn't really ask for more.
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QUOTE(the fieryangel @ Tue 4th May 2010, 12:40pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:14pm)
In any event, I think that Somey and Milton Roe are the site's two most talented writers, and if anyone here is capable of packaging something that a mainstream journalist could use, it would be either (or both) of them
...um, I seem to believe that Horsey does exactly that sort of thing for his living...but you probably forgot that?
Sorry, but I was unaware of Horsey's occupation outside of these pages.
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Strangely, my very tame comment never made it past the "moderation" stage, but the WMF has accepted a comment by, of all people, Tyciol. You may remember Tyciol from earlier discussions. Excellent work, WMF gatekeepers!
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Tue 4th May 2010, 11:43am)
Host it on a static web page, not a wiki. Don't allow commenting on it. Avoid putting it on a website associated with Wikipedia critics (so, sorry, not wikipediareview.com). Let the document speak for itself.
Actually, a wiki might be the best way to gather things together if it's a group effort. One problem I've noticed with WR itself is that it's very hard to get a full picture without hanging out here for a good while and watching the threads spin out different aspects of the issues. It's also quite easy to run a "closed" wiki as well... takes about 5 minutes to set up the localsettings for it, even for a dummy like me.
I'm not even sure the final document couldn't be converted to HTML and hosted on wikipediareview.com, actually, as long as all the citations and data are made readily available.
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All it takes to convert a Wiki page to HTML is to save the page in your browser. (Do a "full save" to save the embedded graphics or icons.) For example, here is my deleted WV talk page, saved as HTML and reposted on a generic web site.
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Well, Moulton asked for my thoughts on "alternative methods...to focus attention on the problem."
Calling in the law could help, although it's entirely possible that we've heard the last of the whole issue; the FBI might ignore it, and that's that.
Wikipedia's dominant position is owing in no small part to its mindshare--which depends (to some extent) on its having at the very least a reasonably good reputation. I sincerely believe (as do most of you) that Wikipedia's reputation doesn't match the reality, and the reason for this is that many wikiscandals and the syndromes that explain them have never been of interest to anyone other than a niche group (including all youse). That's why it is still very easy for most people to believe that most of Wikipedia's problems are little more than amusing "quirks," and at bottom it's pretty much harmless. I think that if the general public knew what all of you (and I) knew, many things could then change. Then things like calls to legislators and law enforcement, as well as petitions and boycotts, could have legs where they do not now. In short, Wikipedia still has a lot of social capital. If it had less, people would use it less, refer to it less, and approach it with a more realistic idea of what it is.
What could bring Wikipedia's social capital more in line with what it deserves to have? Well, that's what I was trying to answer: a summary presentation, with original-source evidence, of Wikipedia's many and varied outrages, such as I described.
The reason I think this would help is, actually, the experience I've had writing "My role in Wikipedia (links)." There aren't many links there all together, but there are enough, with the right descriptions, that it has been linked to directly from within news articles, and has even described by the Wikipedia article about me. Routinely, when the issue of whether I am co-founder of Wikipedia or not comes up, people simply link that page. That page has had legs. It isn't just a one-shot deal, like an average blog post; it has become a reference point in the discussion. Since coming out with those links, all gathered in one spot, it is now virtually impossible for Jimmy Wales to be taken seriously when he--just for example--is obviously contradicting his own first three press releases. Note, this wasn't the case when Jimmy Wales had that IRC conversation. Around that time, the Wikipedia article presented Wales' claims as fact or, at best, repeated my own claims very skeptically. There was no single source the average ADD-addled Internet user could use to check up on the competing claims. All that changed after I posted the collection of links. And since then, I have had to do very little in the way of defending my early role in Wikipedia. That single page had a tremendous impact on Wikipedia's coverage of the issue itself, and to a smaller extent, the news media's as well.
So, imagine the effects of having a similar page which catalogued all the evidence of Wikipedia's institutional insanity in one handy place. Again, people would link to it. They would discuss it. They would use it in arguments. Before too long, I am sure, journalists would link to it (especially if it had a handy domain name all of its own). If anybody denied that Wikipedia had porn, for example, you could simply send them to the page. If somebody said that Wikipedia administrators were actually very helpful and were engaged in an idealistic quest for truth, you could send them to the page. If somebody said, unironically, that Jimmy Wales merely wanted to give the sum total of human knowledge to all the kids in Africa, you could send them to the page. The possibilities are endless!
Here's how you (anybody) could start working on it. Go mine Wikipedia's own catalogs of its own blunders, as well as stuff from wikitruth.info, and just gather the most important links. Then rework the link text as I suggested earlier, and get rid of the links to mere essays and secondary news reports and things like that (unless the contents of the essays or reports are part of the primary source evidence itself). That's what I mean by "baby steps." Just get it up there in a read-protected Google doc or whatever, and solicit (in a very low-key way) participation by other trusted people on wikipediareview.com, or elsewhere (Seth Finkelstein would probably be able to help). Then just organize the links by theme (that's how I'd do it anyway) and work on it from time to time, filling in the gaps. You know how fast Wikipedia articles can grow. Well, if you do this collaboratively, again for example using a read-protected Google Doc, then you could have a good draft read pretty quickly.
Wouldn't making such a thing be a good use of your time, if complaining here on wikipediareview.com is a good use of your time?
In reply to some above comments, added since I started working on my above latest: totally, using a wiki would work. I'd just be worried about people unsympathetic to your cause hijacking your work, and also oversighting embarrassing pages that you locate before you can make a webcitation copy. So that's why I think that it should be drafted on an invite-only wiki. (Did I say "read-only" above? I meant "invite-only.")
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 12:55pm)
QUOTE(the fieryangel @ Tue 4th May 2010, 12:40pm)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 4:14pm)
In any event, I think that Somey and Milton Roe are the site's two most talented writers, and if anyone here is capable of packaging something that a mainstream journalist could use, it would be either (or both) of them
...um, I seem to believe that Horsey does exactly that sort of thing for his living...but you probably forgot that?
Sorry, but I was unaware of Horsey's occupation outside of these pages.
What about it, Horsey? Are you up to the task?
I think with all of the content that is available to a genuine reporter who simply has their eyes open, it is not going to be some magical trick to "ghostwrite" a journalistic piece, then hand it over to some reporter to publish as their own work, only to be discovered that the piece was ghostwritten, bringing said reporter shame and humiliation.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 4th May 2010, 2:51pm)
I think with all of the content that is available to a genuine reporter who simply has their eyes open, it is not going to be some magical trick to "ghostwrite" a journalistic piece, then hand it over to some reporter to publish as their own work, only to be discovered that the piece was ghostwritten, bringing said reporter shame and humiliation.
I wouldn't suggest ghostwriting anything for anyone. I'm only suggesting that we (somebody) collect all the evidence together. You might say that it only takes opening one's eyes, but in that case, I wonder if you aren't underestimating the effectiveness of all the misinformation and disinformation out there. If you don't shove the stuff right under some people's noses, and ask them to take a really big whiff, they will not take you seriously. This is the experience I had recently talking to those school district technical admins. Some of them just refused to believe that the stuff I described as being on Wikipedia really was on there. I didn't want to give them links, because, well, it would be linking to some extremely inappropriate material. What I did in the end was to link to a description of some images in an article by Edwin Black. If had had a chance to link to a simple URL that summed it all up beautifully (that might not be the right word...), then by golly, that's what I would have done. The whole nature of our discussion would have changed. People would have gone to that page, and, whoosh, suddenly their assumptions about the nature of Wikipedia would have gone out the window.
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I'm sympathetic to Larry's suggestion to compile the evidence in one comprehensive package, perhaps on an invite-only Wiki. The opportunity to do that may already be at hand, and if such a project can be launched, I would hope Larry would be a participant.
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QUOTE(Moulton @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:07pm)
I'm sympathetic to Larry's suggestion to compile the evidence in one comprehensive package, perhaps on an invite-only Wiki. The opportunity to do that may already be at hand, and if such a project can be launched, I would hope Larry would be a participant.
Feel free to use content from here, one of the most visited pages on Wikipedia Review.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:18pm)
I'll participate if somebody else sets it up and hosts it.
Larry, if all you have in mind is a single page with an annotated list of links, that would be trivial to set up on Google Knol. The Knol site allows a document to be jointly edited by a team of authors and to remain "unpublished" (not visible to the public) until such time as the authors decide to publish it.
Setting up a private Wiki (or a private namespace within an existing Wiki) might be a bit harder to get started.
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I can recommend against using this wiki to work on it.
I think that this link-fest is going to be useful, but it is not going to be the Holy Grail. Many of the outlandish items that we all know about may appear innocuous to an outside observer. For example, I can point you to the Forms 990 that shows the WMF spending only 34%-41% of revenues on program expenses... but only by putting that in context against how much "real" charities spend (upwards of 80%, typically) does it become an outrage.
Even Jimmy saying "I regard it as a pseudonym, and I don't really have a problem with it" isn't all that explosive, until you understand how treacherous it was for him to be hiring a liar, then installing the liar on the Arbitration Committee.
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Knol, sure, that sounds good to me.
QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:47pm)
I can recommend against using this wiki to work on it.
I think that this link-fest is going to be useful, but it is not going to be the Holy Grail. Many of the outlandish items that we all know about may appear innocuous to an outside observer. For example, I can point you to the Forms 990 that shows the WMF spending only 34%-41% of revenues on program expenses... but only by putting that in context against how much "real" charities spend (upwards of 80%, typically) does it become an outrage.
Even Jimmy saying "I regard it as a pseudonym, and I don't really have a problem with it" isn't all that explosive, until you understand how treacherous it was for him to be hiring a liar, then installing the liar on the Arbitration Committee.
You're right, in the case of the 34-41% statistic, the basic fact is not a "gotcha." That illustrates why I say we need to supply the context minimally necessary to explain why the evidence is important. We shouldn't wax eloquent with moral outrage. Simply the facts. With the quote about Essjay from Wales, well, it will be in a section about Essjay, and the context will allow people to see the outrage in it. Earlier on in the section's timeline, there will be something about Essjay being hired and having dinner with Jimbo and friends, at which time they must have noticed that he was not, in fact, a professor of theology. Then a few lines down, Jimmy installs Essjay as on the Arbitration Committee. Then a few more lines down, "I don't really have a problem with it." What more really needs to be said? The facts themselves are eloquent, and an essay writer using this compendium of wikihistory would find them very interesting. (I think that's about what happened, but it's been a few years, so maybe I have the details off slightly.)
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Tue 4th May 2010, 7:55pm)
Knol, sure, that sounds good to me.
QUOTE(thekohser @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:47pm)
I can recommend against using this wiki to work on it.
I think that this link-fest is going to be useful, but it is not going to be the Holy Grail. Many of the outlandish items that we all know about may appear innocuous to an outside observer. For example, I can point you to the Forms 990 that shows the WMF spending only 34%-41% of revenues on program expenses... but only by putting that in context against how much "real" charities spend (upwards of 80%, typically) does it become an outrage.
Even Jimmy saying "I regard it as a pseudonym, and I don't really have a problem with it" isn't all that explosive, until you understand how treacherous it was for him to be hiring a liar, then installing the liar on the Arbitration Committee.
You're right, in the case of the 34-41% statistic, the basic fact is not a "gotcha." That illustrates why I say we need to supply the context minimally necessary to explain why the evidence is important. We shouldn't wax eloquent with moral outrage. Simply the facts. With the quote about Essjay from Wales, well, it will be in a section about Essjay, and the context will allow people to see the outrage in it. Earlier on in the section's timeline, there will be something about Essjay being hired and having dinner with Jimbo and friends, at which time they must have noticed that he was not, in fact, a professor of theology. Then a few lines down, Jimmy installs Essjay as on the Arbitration Committee. Then a few more lines down, "I don't really have a problem with it." What more really needs to be said? The facts themselves are eloquent, and an essay writer using this compendium of wikihistory would find them very interesting. (I think that's about what happened, but it's been a few years, so maybe I have the details off slightly.)
I remember when I was working on Joe S's site Wikiabuse.com and had the idea of sorting editors by POVs (not making judgements, but simply saying "this editor has a Pro-X POV and this editor has a Anti-X POV", without saying that "X" was necessarily good or bad). The initial results from just pointing that information out were extremely interesting...
...and it was just as we were putting that information on the site that Joe S. got his "takedown" notice that forced him to shut the site down.
sometimes stating the obvious is indeed enough, as long as people can easily connect the dots.
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QUOTE(the fieryangel @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:04pm)
I remember when I was working on Joe S's site Wikiabuse.com and had the idea of sorting editors by POVs (not making judgements, but simply saying "this editor has a Pro-X POV and this editor has a Anti-X POV", without saying that "X" was necessarily good or bad). The initial results from just pointing that information out were extremely interesting...
...and it was just as we were putting that information on the site that Joe S. got his "takedown" notice that forced him to shut the site down.
This is further support for my thesis that a significant fraction if not a majority of active Wikipedia editors are there to forward an agenda other than that of "producing a quality encyclopedia". Wikipedia's doctrine of affirmative anonymity certainly encourages such things, too.
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QUOTE(carbuncle @ Tue 4th May 2010, 5:21pm)
Strangely, my very tame comment never made it past the "moderation" stage, but the WMF has accepted a comment by, of all people, Tyciol. You may remember Tyciol from earlier discussions. Excellent work, WMF gatekeepers!
Tyciol is welcome on every Wikimedia Foundation project, save the English wikipedia. Since his ban there, he's worked on simple wikipedia, simple wiktionary, commons, English wikiquote, English wiktionary, wikisource, mediawiki and Meta. Since he adds content and doesn't make fun of Jimmy Wales, he won't be globally banned.
Anyway, I'd be remiss if I (or someone) didn't point out Derktar's and Kato's Wikipedia Timeline as a good starting point for something like what Doc Sanger is describing. Numerous links are already there, though admittedly few (if any) of them are to webcitation.org (i.e., archived) versions of the pages in question.
It would be fairly easy to turn something like that into static HTML and take it from there (though let's please ensure that Derktar & Kato are properly credited, even if they don't participate in the final result), but personally I don't see why you wouldn't want to use something like an FAQ system or even a keyword-based project manager. "Tag clouds" are the In Thing™ these days, from what I understand. All the rage!
I'd certainly be happy to help in whatever way I can, including setting up such things on WR if possible/desirable (though we have a tendency to panic and delete things when we're successfully hacked, I'm afraid). I'm actually about to go on a little vacation-like thingy in a week or so, though.
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Beautiful! But it's basically just straight history. It doesn't really have even a fraction of the info I'd like to see in the info, and has a lot of what I would consider "noise" in a document that neatly sums up Wikipedia's many and varied governance wikiscandals.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Wed 5th May 2010, 7:33am)
Beautiful! But it's basically just straight history. It doesn't really have even a fraction of the info I'd like to see in the info, and has a lot of what I would consider "noise" in a document that neatly sums up Wikipedia's many and varied governance wikiscandals.
More of a chronicle, actually, and an excellent one at that. To be a true work of history, it must also contain interpretation and analysis, which seems to be what you are aiming for. Still, like all the best chronicles, it can serve as a map to get you to where you want to go. This one is replete with links to web pages that can serve as sources.
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QUOTE(Cedric @ Wed 5th May 2010, 10:01am)
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Wed 5th May 2010, 7:33am)
Beautiful! But it's basically just straight history. It doesn't really have even a fraction of the info I'd like to see in the info, and has a lot of what I would consider "noise" in a document that neatly sums up Wikipedia's many and varied governance wikiscandals.
More of a chronicle, actually, and an excellent one at that. To be a true work of history, it must also contain interpretation and analysis, which seems to be what you are aiming for. Still, like all the best chronicles, it can serve as a map to get you to where you want to go. This one is replete with links to web pages that can serve as sources.
Chronicle, fine. But no, I wasn't suggesting a work of history. It's crucial to what I have in mind that it be focused on amassing evidence, not analysis. "Annotated bibliography of primary sources" would be the closest I have to it. And I'd suggest also that it be written topic-by-topic (at least, that would be the default view) rather than chronologically.
And qua chronicle, I'm not sure how good it was, because the parts that I happen to know about have a few inaccuracies. But it's not bad and it's better than many I've seen.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Tue 4th May 2010, 3:18pm)
I'll participate if somebody else sets it up and hosts it.
I have a green light to set up a hidden wiki for it, but it might need to wait for the weekend (I'm covered in caprine amniotic fluid at the moment because 2 of the does kidded today). PM me if you want an account... jimbophants need not apply, of course.
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QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Tue 4th May 2010, 6:54am)
For another illustration of community discussion regarding pornographic images, see the discussion concerning "Stan Spanker's" uploads here
How absolutely typical of the Freak Show.
The DR was started by Stillwaterising (T-C-L-K-R-D)
, gay-porn gangster and once suspected of being a SlimVirgin sock. And then that great English toad Thryduulf pops out of the Wiki-hole he normally hides in, to object -- at great length. Cary Bass, PM and FloNight call for deletion, resulting in a shitstorm.
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Now if what we have in mind here is along the lines of a new WikiTruth, to take up where they prematurely left off, then please count me in! Dr. Sanger's giant "Fact Sheet" could constitute the mainpage, ordered by topic as he stated, with links to further expound upon and support the basics therein.
Obviously, like its predecessor, this must be a closed Wiki for a variety of reasons. I think I could be of service and know I would be honored to work with you, Dr. Sanger, and the team. I was down tight with the old WikiTruther tribe and, as some here can testify, I have their "style" down pretty well. I might even be able to persuade some of the old crew to join us.
Regardless, Sir, you have my sincerest respect, Ghost
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QUOTE(RDH(Ghost In The Machine) @ Sat 8th May 2010, 6:48pm)
Now if what we have in mind here is along the lines of a new WikiTruth, to take up where they prematurely left off, then please count me in! Dr. Sanger's giant "Fact Sheet" could constitute the mainpage, ordered by topic as he stated, with links to further expound upon and support the basics therein.
Obviously, like its predecessor, this must be a closed Wiki for a variety of reasons. I think I could be of service and know I would be honored to work with you, Dr. Sanger, and the team. I was down tight with the old WikiTruther tribe and, as some here can testify, I have their "style" down pretty well. I might even be able to persuade some of the old crew to join us.
Regardless, Sir, you have my sincerest respect, Ghost
Thanks very much!
I don't know if I have time to devote to it, to be totally honest. I mean, I could step in and offer comments from time to time, but I don't think I would be able to lead the way.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 9th May 2010, 12:12pm)
QUOTE(RDH(Ghost In The Machine) @ Sat 8th May 2010, 6:48pm)
Now if what we have in mind here is along the lines of a new WikiTruth, to take up where they prematurely left off, then please count me in! Dr. Sanger's giant "Fact Sheet" could constitute the mainpage, ordered by topic as he stated, with links to further expound upon and support the basics therein.
Obviously, like its predecessor, this must be a closed Wiki for a variety of reasons. I think I could be of service and know I would be honored to work with you, Dr. Sanger, and the team. I was down tight with the old WikiTruther tribe and, as some here can testify, I have their "style" down pretty well. I might even be able to persuade some of the old crew to join us.
Regardless, Sir, you have my sincerest respect, Ghost
Thanks very much!
I don't know if I have time to devote to it, to be totally honest. I mean, I could step in and offer comments from time to time, but I don't think I would be able to lead the way.
The first time I made goat milk caramel, I ended up making a big mess because I didn't keep stirring the pot.
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QUOTE
If you've been to Europe, you should know that children see more graphic stuff just walking by a newspaper stand on the street than they would on Commons. In Europe there just is not a general shunning of the display of nudity or anything sexual if children could see or become aware of it, as it is the case in the United States. --Asthma bronchiale (talk) 18:53, 9 May 2010 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
I live in Europe (well England). I have travelled widely in all parts of the Continent (as we Brits used to call 'Europe'). This is complete rubbish. Who is this person?
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 9th May 2010, 10:25pm)
QUOTE
If you've been to Europe, you should know that children see more graphic stuff just walking by a newspaper stand on the street than they would on Commons. In Europe there just is not a general shunning of the display of nudity or anything sexual if children could see or become aware of it, as it is the case in the United States. --Asthma bronchiale (talk) 18:53, 9 May 2010 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
I live in Europe (well England). I have travelled widely in all parts of the Continent (as we Brits used to call 'Europe'). This is complete rubbish. Who is this person?
Depends where you go. While the Europeans may not walk the streets with their bits hanging out, certainly the front covers alone on a French news-stand would prompt a tarring-and-feathering in the US. (How well do you think this French anti-smoking advert would have gone down—so to speak—in Kansas?)
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 9th May 2010, 9:25pm)
QUOTE
If you've been to Europe, you should know that children see more graphic stuff just walking by a newspaper stand on the street than they would on Commons. In Europe there just is not a general shunning of the display of nudity or anything sexual if children could see or become aware of it, as it is the case in the United States. --Asthma bronchiale (talk) 18:53, 9 May 2010 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
I live in Europe (well England). I have travelled widely in all parts of the Continent (as we Brits used to call 'Europe'). This is complete rubbish. Who is this person?
I'm fairly certain newspaper stands in Europe open to children don't display photographs of scrotums injected to near the bursting point with saline solution or women on leashes sucking dicks.
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QUOTE(TungstenCarbide @ Sun 9th May 2010, 5:12pm)
QUOTE(dtobias @ Sun 9th May 2010, 11:45pm)
Some of the phone booths I saw in London when I was there a few years ago were plastered with colorful ads for adult services.
Have you ever been to Las Vegas?
Apparently a lot of people there have the desire to be escorted here and there, from what I can tell. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/huh.gif) Forgot to bring anybody to talk to, I guess.
I keep thinking of that Woody Allen story where he has to buy some Mensa level discourse: "I'd like 45 minutes of discussion about Kierkegaard.... " (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/unsure.gif)
Before portable computers and a net connection in your hotel room, it was a tough world out there.
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Sun 9th May 2010, 8:19pm)
QUOTE(TungstenCarbide @ Sun 9th May 2010, 5:12pm)
QUOTE(dtobias @ Sun 9th May 2010, 11:45pm)
Some of the phone booths I saw in London when I was there a few years ago were plastered with colorful ads for adult services.
Have you ever been to Las Vegas?
Apparently a lot of people there have the desire to be escorted here and there, from what I can tell. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/huh.gif) Forgot to bring anybody to talk to, I guess.
I keep thinking of that Woody Allen story where he has to buy some Mensa level discourse: "I'd like 45 minutes of discussion about Kierkegaard.... " (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/unsure.gif)
Before portable computers and a net connection in your hotel room, it was a tough world out there.
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QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 9th May 2010, 10:25pm)
QUOTE
If you've been to Europe, you should know that children see more graphic stuff just walking by a newspaper stand on the street than they would on Commons. In Europe there just is not a general shunning of the display of nudity or anything sexual if children could see or become aware of it, as it is the case in the United States. --Asthma bronchiale (talk) 18:53, 9 May 2010 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
I live in Europe (well England). I have travelled widely in all parts of the Continent (as we Brits used to call 'Europe'). This is complete rubbish. Who is this person?
I think it is Asthma, a German WP user who has been around.
Peter, I would disagree with you somewhat. I remember seeing images from a sex video, showing a man urinating on a woman's breasts, in an open display in Cologne's main pedestrian zone. That was 20 years ago. In Amsterdam, you have shop windows with hookers and all kinds of sex toys.
undelete File:Hodensack_(5).JPG Please undelete File:Hodensack_(5).JPG which was deleted by you without discussion! A clearly non pornographic (guess - it's deleted ...) photograph of a de:Hodensack formerly used to depict de:Hodensackinfusion. Stop deleting useful images. That's vandalism. You are harming the project. --Saibo (Δ) 14:06, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
No, I am not undeleting them. Commons is not an amateur pornography site. We do not want or need images of exhibitionists mutilating their genitalia. Understood? Fran Rogers (talk) 01:00, 8 May 2010 (UTC)
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QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Sun 9th May 2010, 9:49pm)
Depends where you go. While the Europeans may not walk the streets with their bits hanging out, certainly the front covers alone on a French news-stand would prompt a tarring-and-feathering in the US. (How well do you think this French anti-smoking advert would have gone down—so to speak—in Kansas?)
Lets be more realistic: how do you think it would have gone down in Egypt? Iraq?
The US doesn't stone people for making out in public. The US is probably in the middle in terms of the world's response.
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QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Sun 9th May 2010, 9:49pm)
Depends where you go. While the Europeans may not walk the streets with their bits hanging out, certainly the front covers alone on a French news-stand would prompt a tarring-and-feathering in the US. (How well do you think this French anti-smoking advert would have gone down—so to speak—in Kansas?)
well, it depends. Have you ever been to Las Vegas. It's easy to be lulled into the stereotype that Americans are uptight prudes, especially if it makes you feel superior about yourself. But there is a huge variation in local culture in the US, and probably the same goes for every country in the world. I wouldn't begrudge a small Kansas farming town that chooses to deny a business license for a pornshop - it's their call. And I'm not overly shocked by the bums hired to hand out vivid escort fliers at Las Vegas street corners. And most Americans probably don't even notice the magazine cover at almost every supermarket checkout stand which has, for decades, boasted the headline "how to fuck better". So, Eva, please lay off us narrow minded 'tarring-and-feathering' Americans, because I think it's prejudicial, unproductive and probably inaccurate.
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QUOTE(TungstenCarbide @ Sun 9th May 2010, 7:37pm)
QUOTE(Eva Destruction @ Sun 9th May 2010, 9:49pm)
Depends where you go. While the Europeans may not walk the streets with their bits hanging out, certainly the front covers alone on a French news-stand would prompt a tarring-and-feathering in the US. (How well do you think this French anti-smoking advert would have gone down—so to speak—in Kansas?)
well, it depends. Have you ever been to Las Vegas.
Nevermind Las Vegas. Have you ever been to a 40,000+ person Burning Man festival? Europeans come because there's nothing in Europe quite as open in all kinds of different ways, all together. Yes, there are naked women behind glass in Amsterdam, but they're behind glass. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ermm.gif) It's not as though it's happening to a whole society, with no money changing hands.
And at night, it all glows. A coral reef 50 feet down, in the middle of the night, lit flourescently with ultraviolet/blacklight, is all I can compare it to. And even there, there are no naked people, no heavy metal, and no drunken dancing.
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QUOTE(HRIP7 @ Mon 10th May 2010, 1:27am)
QUOTE(Peter Damian @ Sun 9th May 2010, 10:25pm)
QUOTE
If you've been to Europe, you should know that children see more graphic stuff just walking by a newspaper stand on the street than they would on Commons. In Europe there just is not a general shunning of the display of nudity or anything sexual if children could see or become aware of it, as it is the case in the United States. --Asthma bronchiale (talk) 18:53, 9 May 2010 (UTC) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
I live in Europe (well England). I have travelled widely in all parts of the Continent (as we Brits used to call 'Europe'). This is complete rubbish. Who is this person?
I think it is Asthma, a German WP user who has been around.
Peter, I would disagree with you somewhat. I remember seeing images from a sex video, showing a man urinating on a woman's breasts, in an open display in Cologne's main pedestrian zone. That was 20 years ago. In Amsterdam, you have shop windows with hookers and all kinds of sex toys.
In the case of Amsterdam that's in the red light zone, yes. And probably the same for Cologne. The claim made in the first quote above was about "just walking by a newspaper stand on the street", suggesting any old newstand in any old street.
Heh, more of a tax-supporting educational charity. There's a reason Nevada has no state income tax, and it's not oil. Much as with cigarettes, it's all from a special tax on stupidity. Amazing they get away with it. Probably because (as somebody said) few men complain of the lack of brains.
Heh, more of a tax-supporting educational charity. There's a reason Nevada has no state income tax, and it's not oil. Much as with cigarettes, it's all from a special tax on stupidity. Amazing they get away with it.
I would have said "adult educational charity", but we're talking mostly about Congressional and Pentagon junquettes here, so that part's debatable.
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QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Sun 9th May 2010, 4:12pm)
QUOTE(RDH(Ghost In The Machine) @ Sat 8th May 2010, 6:48pm)
Now if what we have in mind here is along the lines of a new WikiTruth, to take up where they prematurely left off, then please count me in! Dr. Sanger's giant "Fact Sheet" could constitute the mainpage, ordered by topic as he stated, with links to further expound upon and support the basics therein.
Obviously, like its predecessor, this must be a closed Wiki for a variety of reasons. I think I could be of service and know I would be honored to work with you, Dr. Sanger, and the team. I was down tight with the old WikiTruther tribe and, as some here can testify, I have their "style" down pretty well. I might even be able to persuade some of the old crew to join us.
Regardless, Sir, you have my sincerest respect, Ghost
Thanks very much!
I don't know if I have time to devote to it, to be totally honest. I mean, I could step in and offer comments from time to time, but I don't think I would be able to lead the way.
That would be plenty! Though we might turn to you on occasion for advice, information and encouragement. To my best knowledge, WikiTruth didn't have single leader per se, nor did it really need one. As long as we keep it a small, smart group who knows what it wants and what it's doing we should be sailing smooth.
Now who else here is with us? Jon? Moulton? Milton? Somey? Horsey?
This post has been edited by RDH(Ghost In The Machine):
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 10th May 2010, 4:37pm)
Heh, more of a tax-supporting educational charity. There's a reason Nevada has no state income tax, and it's not oil. Much as with cigarettes, it's all from a special tax on stupidity. Amazing they get away with it. Probably because (as somebody said) few men complain of the lack of brains.
States will tax cigarettes to fund anti-smoking ads, sure... but damned if they use gambling/lottery revenue to fund math education. That would be madness, no?
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QUOTE(CharlotteWebb @ Tue 11th May 2010, 9:01pm)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 10th May 2010, 4:37pm)
Heh, more of a tax-supporting educational charity. There's a reason Nevada has no state income tax, and it's not oil. Much as with cigarettes, it's all from a special tax on stupidity. Amazing they get away with it. Probably because (as somebody said) few men complain of the lack of brains.
States will tax cigarettes to fund anti-smoking ads, sure... but damned if they use gambling/lottery revenue to fund math education. That would be madness, no?
In all truth, probably it wouldn't make any difference. The draw of gambling is underlain by a completely unfounded belief in one's one specialness in the universe, and it's not something that is going to be undone by a course in statistics.
Reference to whoever it was that wisely observed that you can't unconvince by logic, a person who didn't become convinced by a logical argument in the first place. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/hrmph.gif)
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QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 12th May 2010, 4:59am)
QUOTE(CharlotteWebb @ Tue 11th May 2010, 9:01pm)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 10th May 2010, 4:37pm)
Heh, more of a tax-supporting educational charity. There's a reason Nevada has no state income tax, and it's not oil. Much as with cigarettes, it's all from a special tax on stupidity. Amazing they get away with it. Probably because (as somebody said) few men complain of the lack of brains.
States will tax cigarettes to fund anti-smoking ads, sure... but damned if they use gambling/lottery revenue to fund math education. That would be madness, no?
In all truth, probably it wouldn't make any difference. The draw of gambling is underlain by a completely unfounded belief in one's one specialness in the universe, and it's not something that is going to be undone by a course in statistics.
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QUOTE(anthony @ Wed 12th May 2010, 6:42am)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Wed 12th May 2010, 4:59am)
QUOTE(CharlotteWebb @ Tue 11th May 2010, 9:01pm)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 10th May 2010, 4:37pm)
Heh, more of a tax-supporting educational charity. There's a reason Nevada has no state income tax, and it's not oil. Much as with cigarettes, it's all from a special tax on stupidity. Amazing they get away with it. Probably because (as somebody said) few men complain of the lack of brains.
States will tax cigarettes to fund anti-smoking ads, sure... but damned if they use gambling/lottery revenue to fund math education. That would be madness, no?
In all truth, probably it wouldn't make any difference. The draw of gambling is underlain by a completely unfounded belief in one's one specialness in the universe, and it's not something that is going to be undone by a course in statistics.
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QUOTE(RDH(Ghost In The Machine) @ Wed 12th May 2010, 4:36am)
QUOTE(Moulton @ Wed 12th May 2010, 2:53am)
Check with SB_Johnny regarding closed Wikis. If you want a closed Knol page, check with me.
Much as I like Knols, they just don't attract as many eyeballs (nor ironically have the Google juice) as Wikis.
QUOTE(Larry Sanger @ Wed 12th May 2010, 4:35am)
I'll go wherever the action seems to be...
OK, I created a namespace for now, here. I didn't add any security yet (though you do need to provide an email addy to register on NetKnowledge).
Security-wise, I can enable Extension:Lockdown to at least make it difficult to see. Or I can just add another wiki to the trunk and lock it down even harder. Depends how much you really care about whether it's publicly viewable and/or editable. Our best "tech guy" is AFK for a bit due to tornado-related difficulties, but he might be able to secure it better when he gets back.
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QUOTE(SB_Johnny @ Wed 12th May 2010, 10:55am)
OK, I created a namespace for now, here. I didn't add any security yet (though you do need to provide an email addy to register on NetKnowledge).
Security-wise, I can enable Extension:Lockdown to at least make it difficult to see. Or I can just add another wiki to the trunk and lock it down even harder. Depends how much you really care about whether it's publicly viewable and/or editable. Our best "tech guy" is AFK for a bit due to tornado-related difficulties, but he might be able to secure it better when he gets back.
I absolutely support this effort; however, I'm also making a prediction that it will not amount to much if you don't set it up as its own root domain and publicize (spam) the heck out of it. A sub-space of a larger wiki just doesn't move hearts, minds, or traffic.
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QUOTE(thekohser @ Wed 12th May 2010, 11:46am)
QUOTE(SB_Johnny @ Wed 12th May 2010, 10:55am)
OK, I created a namespace for now, here. I didn't add any security yet (though you do need to provide an email addy to register on NetKnowledge).
Security-wise, I can enable Extension:Lockdown to at least make it difficult to see. Or I can just add another wiki to the trunk and lock it down even harder. Depends how much you really care about whether it's publicly viewable and/or editable. Our best "tech guy" is AFK for a bit due to tornado-related difficulties, but he might be able to secure it better when he gets back.
I absolutely support this effort; however, I'm also making a prediction that it will not amount to much if you don't set it up as its own root domain and publicize (spam) the heck out of it. A sub-space of a larger wiki just doesn't move hearts, minds, or traffic.
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Wikipedia Distributing Child Porn, Co-Founder Tells FBI - FOXNews
