Quora Options

[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.

[mbz1]

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.

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.

This post has been edited by mbz1: Sat 10th March 2012, 3:10am

[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

[EricBarbour]

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

[HRIP7]

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?

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:

Media with pornographic content are regularly considered to be obviously and severely harmful to minors (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 very sharp increase in murder, assault and robbery 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?

This post has been edited by HRIP7: Sat 10th March 2012, 4:08am

[lilburne]

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 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.

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

[HRIP7]

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.

Someone is looking for it on Commons. 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 this on Wikipedia and instead find this.

[Peter Damian]

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.

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).

[lilburne]

Someone is looking for it on Commons. And it's a site widely believed to be suitable for use in schools, etc., yet its videos include even bestiality porn.

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

[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

[jsalsman]

did you know that the Czech study you quote noted a very sharp increase in murder, assault and robbery 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?

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.

[the fieryangel]

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.

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 lesbian nuns films involving beastiality?

Is this "normal" to you people?

[Cla68]

Boycott the WMF

[carbuncle]

Boycott the WMF

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

[the fieryangel]

Boycott the WMF

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

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.

[tarantino]

Boycott the WMF

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

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 fake blogs and domains with registrations hidden behind proxies, all using the same adsense ID. Google apparently is looking the other way because it brings in money.

[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.

[dogbiscuit]

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.

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

[EricBarbour]

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.

They also tend not to have sixty-nine photos of male anuses (some with objects inserted.)

Nor do they have 30 images of "Santorum-related matter".

Nor do they have Sexual penetrative use of bananas, or Sexual penetrative use of cucumbers.

Nor do they have 160 photos of pasties.

Nor do they have 31 images of gags, with nine subcategories.

Nor do they have 103 images of spanking, with 6 subcategories.

Or 53 videos of ejaculation. 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.)

This post has been edited by EricBarbour: Sun 11th March 2012, 1:58am