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Posted by: HRIP7

Question on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Technology-in-Education/Are-Wikipedia-and-Wikimedia-Commons-appropriate-for-K-8-students-to-use

Posted by: melloden

Obviously not completely, but then again, neither is the Internet in general.

Now I think they have selective Internet filters that allow parents or schools to block certain pages (such as Wikipedia's pornography article) but just like any filter for any purpose, kids are smart enough to get around them if they're really horny.

Posted by: Detective

Are there any K-9 users of Wikipedia? If so, do they know about FT2?

Posted by: thekohser

...sigh...

I don't know why it's necessary to say this so often, but people seem to forget it...

"The Internet in general" is not a tax-exempt 501-c-3 "educational charity". The Wikimedia Foundation is. It should be held to a higher standard than "the Internet in general".

Posted by: the fieryangel

You must know this guy :



....Wikipedia, where convicted child molesters can anonymously "educate" children....

By the way, Sue Gardner has been made aware of all of this. I wonder if she's going to make some sort of statement?

Posted by: Cla68

Some very good answers posted so far. I don't think anyone from the WMF will try to give an answer, because they have no case.

Posted by: mbz1

Sure they responded. Brandon Harris, who is WMF employee, and two other poster kids of Wikipedia voted for this comment:


BTW this comment is quite stupid. Nobody is arguing that a kid could get hit by a car in a big city, but what it has to do with exposing children to pornography at the site that should provide education.

Posted by: Rhindle

These Defenders of the Porn are just as bad as the right-wing Tea Baggers. Even something that rational people on both sides of the argument can agree with, image filtering, they have to stubbornly argue against it like it's going to ruin everything. How does an image filter prevent someone from getting access to their god-given right to all kinds of porn? Congratulations uncompromising porn defenders, you think just like the Tea Party!

Posted by: lilburne

That may be why WP employees are upvoting Janssen's comment.

Posted by: TungstenCarbide

Bingo! Hell fire and brimstone fundamentalist preachers in heat, thumping their chests in self-righteous over the sanctity of anti-censorship, and every six year old's god given right to study images of autofellatio.

Posted by: Peter Damian

I nearly suggested adding some interesting books on autofellatio to our local primary school library. Also that they remove that silly steel gate outside the playground which creates a nasty 'insulated garden' that gives the 9 year olds such an incomplete view of the world. But then I thought puritans like Larry and the rest would have a go at me.

Posted by: Peter Damian

Oh I see Richard Symonds, WMUK office manager has also voted approval of educating young children about pornography by showing it to them. Well done Richard. That reminds me I must reply to the Charity Commission this weekend. Boy I have some interesting stuff for them.

Posted by: jsalsman

I'm interested in knowing what the evidence is that exposing children to sexually explicit material causes harm. It's not hard to find http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=480365544#Sexually_explicit_material_is_not_harmful_at_all. I understand why it seems repugnant and why it might get school administrators and teachers in trouble, but I'm wondering if anyone has any empirical findings supporting the idea of harm.

Posted by: mbz1

What kind of evidences are you looking for?

Posted by: the fieryangel

Mainly because pedophiles themselves say that http://focus.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=53036

So, are you a pedophile?

Posted by: EricBarbour

I posted some comments on Quora, although frankly it's probably a waste of time.
Beaudette and Walling have all day long (and paychecks) to troll social-media sites, and I don't.

The more I see of those two, the more I dislike them.

Yes, Mr. Salsman, are you a pedophile?

Posted by: thekohser

Here you go:

http://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(00)00137-3/abstract

http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567(09)60387-7/abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10579105

http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2005.8.473

Posted by: jsalsman

No. Nor have I ever edited on any even vaguely related topic. But I'm completely convinced that the moral panic is completely unjustified. Here's why: kids exposed to porn are much more easily able to talk about sex with their parents, teachers, the police, etc. That's why kids exposed to porn have a far lower sexual assault victimization and perpetration rates, as has been repeatedly documented every time it has been studied. Maybe it's counter-intuitive but it's the same result over and over any time someone studies the question.


Okay. The first is conjecture without any findings in its conclusions, and it's talking more about fiction TV and movies than anything you would be likely to find on Commons. ("The erotica under consideration are not so much those explicitly depicting coital behaviors as those that are less explicit and present a fuller social context of sexual engagements.")

The second is a review of "television and movies, rock music and music videos, advertising, video games, and computers and the Internet," which would be interesting in its finding that the, "primary effects of media exposure are increased violent and aggressive behavior, increased high-risk behaviors, including alcohol and tobacco use, and accelerated onset of sexual activity," were it not for their caveat that, "newer forms of media have not been adequately studied." And the risk of accelerated onset of sexual activity has not been observed with the availability of internet porn or Wikipedia -- just the opposite: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_23/sr23_031.pdf Frankly, I think this is because of the easily availability of internet porn (and Wikipedia is insignificant in the whole scheme of internet porn) and I will gladly elaborate for anyone who can't figure out for themselves why this might be. (Hint: search for "clopping".)

http://www.hawaii.edu/hivandaids/No_Excuses__Televised_Pornography_Harms_Children.pdf is a collection of anecdotes which claims "harm" in the title but only unquantified "risk" in its summary. It claims that conclusions can't be drawn from clinical data, which is absurd. There have been several longitudinal studies looking at exposure to pornography, but that's never been significant for any negative outcomes. Parental alcohol dependence and the mother's educational background are usually the most significant factors for the risks they claim.

The fourth says, "Concerns about a large group of young children exposing themselves to pornography on the Internet may be overstated." Yeah, that's about the size of it.

Does anyone else have any sources which counter the repeated results that easy availability to porn is associated with halving or better of child sex victimization rates?

Posted by: EricBarbour

I don't think either you or Greg have proven anything. It's easy to find studies that support one position or another, and it's just as easy to discount them.

Want some related items?
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/01/10289454-disgusted-beyond-belief-parents-shaken-by-ex-calif-teachers-molestation-charges

The point that I'm trying to make is that it doesn't matter what the studies say. The very idea of child
molesters approaching children, anywhere, is enough to send parents into berserk panic.

Wikimedia and its pathetic "community" are not handling the Mozhenkov flap, or the porn that is
provably on Commons, or even the "http://www.quora.com/Technology-in-Education/Are-Wikipedia-and-Wikimedia-Commons-appropriate-for-K-8-students-to-use" nonsense from last week, with anything resembling
adult responsibility and seriousness. Instead, they Wiki-lawyer and squabble and lie and misdirect
and cover up.

Mr. Salsman, I still don't understand why you're defending those people. They kicked you off their servers, like a common vandal.

Posted by: Larry Sanger

Clearly, there's a heavy burden on the part of the idiots who claim that children are not harmed by seeing pornography. I'm inclined to go with generations of sensible parents who absolutely require that their children be kept away from the stuff. The notion that you can do a study to determine the harm belies any comprehension of the matter, anyway. Parents keep their children away from porn because they don't want their children knowing about sex in that much detail, coming to wrong conclusions about it (oh, so that's what it looks like then?), and getting sexualized much too young. How do you do studies about these things? It's impossible, or very difficult, anyway. Seeing it at a young age may also well lead them to believe that pornography itself is morally acceptable, and many parents (especially mothers) are much concerned to nix that idea as much as they can.

This is not a matter of "moral panic." The more unhinged sort of libertarian--as opposed to principled ones, like myself--really do sound like idiots when they call any policy criticism from a moral point of view "moral panic."

Posted by: Cla68

The WMF is in a bind here. This issue has the potential of causing them great embarrassment, perhaps effecting their credibility and donations totals. But, if they do anything about it, then it will show that they can and do exercise management control over their content. Of course, the fact that the latter option shows accountability and responsibility is apparently not a factor in their decision-making.

Posted by: mbz1

I am interested to hear your opinions on this matter:
Should WMF get more involved in protecting children from pedophiles and from being bullied on their site versus leaving a policy and enforcement decisions to voting by mostly anonymous community that probably does not represent views of a general population. Thanks.

Posted by: jsalsman

Is there an alternative hypothesis explaining the dramatic drop in sex crimes including child victimization and perpetration after porn became easily available to kids in Japan, Denmark, and the Czech Republic? Or the steadily increasing age of sexual activity onset coincident with wider internet availability here in the US?




Why? There are several peer reviewed secondary studies, and all of them disagree with your "sensible" conclusions. Give me an actual reason that moral panic isn't exactly what is going on here.

The idea that kids looking for porn on the internet are going to search Wikipedia or Commons instead of Google or Yahoo is just ridiculous, and we all know why. I'm not defending anyone, I'm just trying to keep people's knee jerking from making fools of themselves.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Before you perform knee surgery on others, make sure your own knee is not twitching.

Posted by: HRIP7

It's simply not a mainstream position that pornography should be openly available to minors. Even in Western democracies the law generally requires a minimum age of 18 for admission to pornographic movies, sex shops, etc. Anyone inviting 14-year-olds to browse their porn shop would be closed down very quickly.

If and when that changes, based on new accepted scientific knowledge, then it is fine for Wikimedia to do the same. Until such time (if it ever comes), Wikimedia should simply behave like a mainstream organisation, rather than pushing an extreme fringe position.

Here is a representative link from a Western government website:

http://www.bundespruefstelle.de/bpjm/information-in-english.html (German government website)

Anything else is the equivalent of original research by laypeople, based on partial data on a very complex phenomenon.

For example, did you know that the Czech study you quote noted a http://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2010to2014/2010-porn-in-czech-republic.html#fig1 after democratisation made pornography widely available? Did you note that the increase in the murder rate was far, far greater than the decrease in sex crimes? And did you note that the downward trend in sex crimes began well before porn became widely available, and continued steadily throughout the entire period of observation, with democratisation having no discernible impact on an already established trend, while nonsexual crimes shot up in 1989, when democratisation began? Did you note that taken overall, sexual and nonsexual crimes almost doubled after democratisation?

Posted by: lilburne

Is there a causal relationship between porn and sex crimes involving children? I suspect that as with so many other things that this is far more complex than the modification of any single variable. Besides coca-cola changed their formulae during that same period so maybe we could graph that too.

http://www.crab.rutgers.edu/~goertzel/mythsofmurder.htm

Posted by: HRIP7

http://stats.grok.se/commons.m/top. And it's a site widely believed to be suitable for use in schools, etc., yet its videos include even bestiality porn.

Of course you are right that generally speaking, there are lots of better sites for anyone who wants to look at porn. But there is also a concern about people who are looking for https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jumping+ball&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=899&bih=969&sei=KmBZT6azMcit0QW7z52hCg on Wikipedia and instead http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=jumping%20ball&fulltext=Search&profile=images&redirs=1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jumping_ball_01.jpg.

Posted by: Peter Damian

So Dr Sanger is a conservative! Conservatism, or at least one strand of it, is the view that many commonly held or popular or mainstream beliefs are the result of a massive crowdsourcing exercise that has gone on for hundreds of generations, which resulted in a Darwinian selection of the ideas and beliefs or codes of practices that worked best, and a rejection of those that didn't. This is opposed to progressivism and the ideas of the Enlightenment, that most of these old survivals of thought are mere superstition, to be swept away by universalism, reason etc etc.

The odd irony is that Wikipedia is fundamentally an enlightenment project, yet fuelled by crowdsourcing. The crowsourcing of hacker culture versus the crowdsourcing of generations.

(I'm just re-reading Berlin's 'The Counter-Enlightenment' at the moment).

Posted by: lilburne

You may find that is mostly niabot and a handful of the other porn merchants.

Posted by: Peter Damian

The point is that, just as we might want to exclude porn from a children's library, so we might want to exclude it from an educational resource. A comprehensive and reliable reference work is not the place I expect to find pornography. Pornography (derivation: writing you might find on the wall of a brothel) is illiterate sexual chatter, crude imagery without artistic or intellectual interest. It has no place in an encyclopedia.

Wikimedia Commons itself might be of interest to historians in a hundred years' time, as an interesting artefact displaying a failed attempt by the masses to devise an educational resource. That does not make it an educational resource of itself.

Posted by: jsalsman

That is just a useless waste of effort, because there is plenty of evidence that when people try to shelter kids from sex or make it taboo, those kids become more vulnerable to victimization. Molesters can shame kids who are ashamed of sex, or taught that it is wrong, into a terrible silence. But kids who know what sex is, what it looks like, and who joke about it with their parents and friends, aren't going to "just keep this our special secret" between them and their pervert uncle. Someone should start correcting the voluminous anti-porn rants to reflect reality until people start waking up.

I don't try to stop the people who want to make better opt-in filters, and http://suegardner.org/2011/09/28/on-editorial-judgment-and-empathy/#comments But the extent to which this is wasting time because of revenge seekers who think it's a useful wedge issue is pathetic. If all these people complaining about porn actually cared about the well being of children, they would ditch their libertarian ideals for something that might put a dent in the 1.6 million homeless children in the US -- 1 out of every 45 kids -- up from 1.2 million just three years prior. Many of those kids have no alternative but prostitution to survive. Those are real children, not cheap lolicon cartoons serving to divert perverts from chasing real kids.

But instead we end up with these ridiculous efforts from otherwise apparently highly intelligent people who, in complaining about porn on Wikipedia and Commons but not the other 99.99999% of the porn on the internet, do nothing for children, nothing for any of their own causes, and put a giant neon sign over their name and reputation saying, "Hi! I have an axe to grind and I lack the self-discipline to avoid accusing people who have angered me of corrupting the morals of the youth without any basis in fact! Are you a pedophile?"

Then you'd better re-read the definition of comprehensive.

Posted by: jsalsman

Yeah. That was probably due to the government infrastructure collapse. Nothing like that happened when kids got easy access to porn in Japan or Denmark, or during widespread internet availability in the US.

Posted by: the fieryangel

Well, I see that, by being an active commentor on Sue's Blog, that you're certainly a neutral party in this discusion. ..

We're all aware that the entire internet is full of porn. However, unlike Wikipedia, the rest of internet porn is not claiming to be part of a not-for-profit educational resource.

The statistical studies that you're quoting are meaningless, merely ways of framing two independant sets of data to try to push your agenda, which is clearly visible to everyone here.

There are educational resources to inform children about sex and about sexual predators. These materials do not use the same language or presentation as those intended for adults because children perceive these issues differently.

Now, do you really mean to say that you defend the fact that when you type "devoirs" ("homework" in French) in the commons search engine, the first result is a very, very NSFW http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=devoirs&title=Special%3ASearch

Is this "normal" to you people?

Posted by: Cla68

http://boycott-wikipedia.blogspot.com/

Posted by: carbuncle

I got a chuckle out of wondering why you didn't use http://boycottwikipedia.blogspot.com .

Posted by: the fieryangel

The point of all of this is that there is no defense in exposing children to all of this porn. That's the bottom line.

Posted by: tarantino

If you search for the phone number 415-992-7864 that's found on the site that boycottwikipedia.blogspot.com redirects to, the results show hundreds of https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=415-992-7864+site:blogspot.com and https://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=415-992-7864+-site%3Ablogspot.com, all using the same adsense ID. Google apparently is looking the other way because it brings in money.

Posted by: Mister Die

Apparently encyclopedias need to show hardcore pornography (or porn in general) so that children can effectively fight against sexual predators.

That's a very unique way of looking at an encyclopedia and its tasks.

Last time I checked encyclopedias have articles on general sexual matters. They approach the subject maturely, and they certainly don't show an ejaculating penis or anal sex in the process.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

The other issue with the jsalsman argument is that it sounds to me like grooming. Wikipedia is the pervert uncle.

Posted by: EricBarbour

They also tend not to have http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Male_human_anuses (some with objects inserted.)

Nor do they have 30 images of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Santorum_neologism-related_images.

Nor do they have http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sexual_penetrative_use_of_bananas, or http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sexual_penetrative_use_of_cucumbers.

Nor do they have 160 photos of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Pasties.

Nor do they have 31 images of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gags, with nine subcategories.

Nor do they have 103 images of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spanking, with 6 subcategories.

Or 53 videos of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos_of_ejaculation_by_format. Neatly organized by video file format.

(All of the above NSFW, some of the above are extremely disgusting. You have been warned. And this is only a small sample.)

Posted by: EricBarbour

Would anyone like to try and claim that Wikipedia is NOT-MISOGYNISTIC?

If so, please explain http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Suspension_bondage.
Only two of the 56 images show men being tortured and/or killed.

Posted by: Mister Die

Those inclined towards men are too busy photographing their anuses to tend to that shortage at the moment.

Edit: Also the Spanking category has this helpful notice: "Please note that low-quality images with no realistic educational use nor a purpose within the Wikimedia projects may be deleted. For further information, see Commons:Nudity."

Unfortunately they have 102 (arguably 103) photos more than is necessary for "realistic educational use."

Edit II: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bo%C3%AEte_%C3%A0_gifles.jpg

One of the three images in the "Spanking machines" category, the only one worksafe.

Posted by: thekohser

Sure, that's easy. Over the period of the study, the population of Hispanics in the United States has increased dramatically, especially in the childhood and teen age cohorts. They are more likely to be Catholic, and thus adhere to a more conservative approach toward sexuality (i.e., abstinence), so we are seeing the impact of this demographic seismic shift in the age of onset of sexual activity. Thankfully, the increased use and availability of Internet porn isn't having much to do with increasing the sexual activity among (Catholic) Hispanics, because of the digital divide (i.e., Hispanics are not as likely as non-Hispanics to be connected to the Internet).

Posted by: jsalsman

That might have something to do with it, but I'm not sure 35 million Hispanics in 2000 to 50 million at present can completely explain the magnitudes of kids waiting to have sex. Other kids have to be waiting longer too, don't they? If it was 0 to 50 million over the same time period, those figures would be about the size, assuming all Hispanics never have sex as teens, which isn't right either. It turns out Hispanics get pregnant about 50% more often than most kids, but I don't know how much of that is due to birth control taboos.

Posted by: Zoloft

• As the Baby Boomers age, the visible population becomes less sexually engaging.
• The obesity epidemic is reducing testosterone levels in pubescent males.
• As sex is associated with crazy people on television and the Internet, it becomes something to be avoided by youths.

Posted by: HRIP7

Another Quora question:

http://www.quora.com/Is-Wikipedia-in-general-inaccurate-If-not-why-is-it-believed-to-be-so

Posted by: Fusion

Amazing. Thoughtful answers that on the whole seem very plausible and are by no means 100% pro-Wikipedia. (Ignore the last very short reply!) I find it hard to know if the picture they paint is slightly too rosy, though I am inclined to believe it is. However, it is no whitewash.