EXCLUSIVE: Pedophiles Find a Home on Wikipedia - FOXNews Options Rating

[Newsfeed]

FOXNews

Wikipedia has become home base for a loose worldwide network of pedophiles who are campaigning to spin the popular online encyclopedia in ...

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/06/25/...e-on-wikipedia/

[Peter Damian]

The discussion on Jimbo's talk page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo#Fox_News_report is bizarre. The main line of reasoning is that Fox News is right wing and bad, ergo everything in the article is false. No one seems actually to have read the article. The claims in the article are as follows

1. Chat room posts show efforts by pedophiles to use Wikipedia. This is correct, as anyone who visits the chat room (boychat) can verify.

2. Message boards include links to Wikipedia articles that 'need to be edited'. This is easy to verify.

3. (Quoting von Erk) Pedophiles have campaigned to push their POV on Wikipedia. Absolutely true. I myself earned a block for opposing their point of view. Or rather, for saying perfectly true things that were deemed 'personal attacks'.

4. (Quoting Sue Gardner) 'Wikipedia has a zero tolerance policy' - that is the one thing that is clearly false, but then they are quoting Sue Gardner.

5. A series of recent postings from the message board itself, which I can verify are true.

6. Some three-year old postings from Girlchat.

7. Mention of Wikipedia's critics (horror!). True: Wikipedia has critics.

8. The claim that the NAMBLA article has links to the NAMBLA site. True.

9. A quote from Hemanshu Negam, who works in IT security.

10. The claim that 'anyone can edit Wikipedia'. Surely not?

11. A claim about a post on Boychat by a user called 'Squeakbox'. Also perfectly true. There is such a user who names himself after the Wikipedia user (who is clearly not the same person, but anyone can give themselves an anonymous user name - that's the whole problem with anonymous user names).

12. Wikisposure has identified many convicted pedophiles who have been Wikipedia users. True. Many have been kicked off, but they just return under different user names. True. There is even one who was called 'Dominique' who returned calling themself 'DominiqueEncore'. Clever eh? Well none of the admins spotted it.

13. More claims by Nigam, who is co-chairman of President Obama's Online Safety Technology Group.

In summary, I feel that FOX, apparently having found no legal support for claims that Wikipedia distributes child pornography, is now criticizing us because we allow the description of well-known pedophiles and pedophile political organizations. But it's all too clear that pretending the issue doesn't exist has never done anything to protect children. Wnt (talk) 03:51, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

No, read the article, idiot. The criticism is that Wikipedia allows outbound links to pedophile propagandist organisations and message boards.

Fox News cites Hemanshu Nigam of SSP Blue, who — they say — speaking of the articles Pedophilia, NAMBLA, Child sex tourism, Sexual objectification, Child erotica, and Simulated child pornography, said that "These Wikipedia articles, edited and shared by pedophiles, are nothing but guideposts to get them aroused". I think that a brief examination of any of these articles refutes this outright.

Read the guy's biography, idiot. http://sspblue.com/wp-content/uploads/2010...-Nigam-Bio-.pdf

This post has been edited by Peter Damian: Sat 26th June 2010, 6:55pm