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[HRIP7]

Question on Quora:

Are Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons appropriate for K-8 students to use?

[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?

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Fri 9th March 2012, 10:36pm

[jsalsman]

Mr. Salsman, are you a pedophile?

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.

I'm interested in knowing what the evidence is that exposing children to sexually explicit material causes harm. It's not hard to find contrary evidence. 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.

Here you go:

http://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139...0137-3/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

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: "from 1988 through 2006–2010, the percentage of teenaged females who were sexually experienced declined significantly (from 51% in 1988 to 43% in 2006–2010)." Even greater number of males are waiting to have sex (Figure 1 on p. 6.) 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".)

The third 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?

[EricBarbour]

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?

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...olestation.html
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/02/...station-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 "tolling bell" 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.

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Sat 10th March 2012, 1:43am

[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."

This post has been edited by Larry Sanger: Sat 10th March 2012, 2:07am

[jsalsman]

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.

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?

The notion that you can do a study to determine the harm belies any comprehension of the matter, anyway.

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.

This post has been edited by jsalsman: Sat 10th March 2012, 3:29am

[Peter Damian]

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.

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.

[jsalsman]

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.

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 I've certainly tried to help when I thought it might do some good. 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?"

A comprehensive and reliable reference work is not the place I expect to find pornography.

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

This post has been edited by jsalsman: Sat 10th March 2012, 11:31am

[Mister Die]

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.

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.