Current State of Wikipedia on the Porn Issue ? Options

[Jon Awbrey]

Where would I find our best introduction or most succinct summary for interested outsiders on the current state of the Wiki-Porn issue?

There are active discussions of related matters on Facebook, and it always astounds me how often casual observers get taken in by Jimmy Sue's disinformation campaigns.

Jon (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/dry.gif)

[Somey]

For a succinct and clear summary, one of us is going to have to write a blog entry, and I suspect that the someone should probably be me. The problem is that it's very hard to maintain any sort of serious, or even non-lowbrow, discussion about porn anywhere on the internet, even on sites with closed and heavily-vetted membership lists. WR is no exception. Such discussions always go off on tangents and are full of various obscene/silly references and such... many of which are posted by yours truly, of course.

Another problem is that not everyone here agrees on just how serious the problem is, or whether or not it's an issue we should rally around, even if we support the more general notion that WP has waaaay too much porn.

Having said that, I actually liked the recent thread on the so-called "2010 Wikimedia Study of Controversial Content" by WMF consultant Robert Harris. It actually started out taking a fairly positive slant, with many of us wanting to give the WMF/WP folks the benefit of the doubt, etc., and follows through almost to the point of conclusively proving that nothing positive will happen as a result of it. (I should say that it also contains one of my own better recent moments, when I pointed out (around page 6, I think) that of the roughly 1,000 penis photos on Wikimedia Commons, there actually was one taken of a black guy, contrary to what Harris had observed - only it's a grotesquely diseased black-guy penis, not a nice healthy one like all the white-guy penises.)

Anyway, I was thinking we could try to work out something fairly brief that covers all the main points, with a few links to key evidenciary pages, and then write it up and post it both here and on the blog. It could (and probably should) have some humor in it, but not of a sexual nature, since that would just be too obvious, and (I daresay) too cheap.