What should we do about Wikipedia's mature content problem?

http://larrysanger.org/2012/05/what-should-we-do-about-wikipedias-porn-problem/

by lazugod • 14 years ago

44 48 14 years ago

Kliment• 14 years ago

I think a good interim solution would be to have a client-side filter, browser extension or such. Wikipedia content is very well categorized, so it's not a classical content filtering problem.

tantalor2• 14 years ago

I was curious just how well the categories are exposed to clients. I didn't find any HTTP headers or HTML meta tags, but a text scan for "Category:" would do well.

hapless• 14 years ago

I'm not one hundred percent sure that this is a problem. Context is important. Pornographic material in Wikipedia's "NPOV" and encyclopedic context is probably not unsettling to children.

If this is a real issue, and pedagogues or parents are offended, how has Wikipedia gotten away with it this long?

planetguy• 14 years ago

I wouldn't have thought so either, but apparently there are some folks out there who are enjoying pushing the limit of exactly how much pornography they can incorporate into wikipedia.

I mean, do we really need an article on the subject "Cock And Ball Torture"? I would have thought it was fairly self-explanatory. If so, does it really need to be illustrated with four photographs?

(You can look it up, I'm not gonna provide a link.)

I'm guessing, here, that the page exists less for the greater edification of mankind and more for the sexual jollies of that rather narrow section of humanity which happens to enjoy not only putting their genitals in "humblers", "testicle cuffs" and "parachutes", but also get off on exhibitionism.

I dunno if it's "unsettling to children", but that page is sure as hell unsettling to me.

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

>but apparently there are some folks out there who are enjoying pushing the limit of exactly how much pornography they can incorporate into wikipedia.

Bingo. I would even go as far as to say that wiki's have this way of attracting entire sub-cultures of contributors who enjoy sneaking such things in wherever they can shoe-horn them. (See: Tvtropes.) On the one hand I support wikipedia's position that they shouldn't censor the articles. But on the other hand I don't see limiting this subtle vandalism as censorship. It's more of quality control than anything else.

nextstep• 14 years ago

You know where else kids can see pornographic images? Nearly everywhere else on the open Internet. Like this article mentions near the end, children can easily see whatever they please with a Google Image search.

So should we pour money and time into protecting young eyes? Wikimedia probably agrees with me when I think that this goal is probably impossible and thus a waste of resources.

If parents can't accept that their kids will see a lot of different things online, then they should monitor their children's online activity themselves. Shouldn't parents be the ones who do the parenting?

And last, kids are curious. What is the worst that could happen to curious children viewing porn on the Internet? I think the author of the post has a strong cultural bias against depoctions of sexuality. Wikipedia also contains many graphic depictions of violence. Isn't this much, much worse than pornography?

batiudrami• 14 years ago

I was going to write basically this comment but had trouble expressing it coherently. However, I think there should be an (optional) filter on search results to prevent mature results being returned accidentally. There's no point trying to stop kids seeking out this kind of content if that's what they're looking for (a losing battle if ever I heard one), but like the example given in the article - a search for 'Human Male' shouldn't give results any more inappropriate than you'd find in a physical encyclopedia.

lopatin• 14 years ago

He doesn't disagree with you, one of his main points was that Wikipedia hosts very very disgusting porn. The fact that children can find porn if they seek it out does not mean we should be presenting it to them on a very public website like Wikipedia. Should it suddenly be ok to post nsfl images everywhere in society because anybody can find it if they really want to? Because I feel like Wikipedia doing this is a step in that direction

kijin2• 14 years ago

What's so disgusting about animated GIFs of men jerking off? Every boy is going to learn how to do that very soon. Given the abominable state of sex education in many parts of the world, I would much rather kids learned about sex on Wikipedia than on porn sites that grossly misrepresent the subject matter.

Some of the BDSM and genital mutilation stuff, to be sure, is rather disturbing. Still, those images and videos are on Wikipedia because there are articles that explain relevant topics. It's not like they will turn up when some kid searches for "boobs".

No, it's not OK to post nsfl images everywhere. But no, I don't think that means we should remove them even from places where they are appropriate. Do you want disturbing images removed from anatomy textbooks, too? Kids can easily find those books in libraries, after all.

ghurlman• 14 years ago

Google's default search, even the image search, filters for porn.

jlgreco2• 14 years ago

While they are quite good, I think we all know how imperfect those filters are.

luke_s4• 14 years ago

Apart from the fact that the violence is far, far worse than pornography, I totally disagree.

But first: my credentials. I'm a father of two, and I've recently been visiting a number of schools seaching for a primary school for my eldest. My brother is a network admin, at a primary school. Part of his responsibility is administering the internet filters.

Frankly, children don't get to be on the open internet. Every school has a filter. At home, I've turned on safe search, locked down youtubes default settings, etc. Can children get around it? Absolutly! Part of my brothers job is to search through the network shares each month and remove the porn.

However, blocking 100% of the 'bad stuff' is not what this is about. Nobody is still stupid enough to belive that you can install some technological measure, that will stop everything. Espically, if somebody sets out to explicitly circiumvent it.

What this is all about is reducing the chance of in-advertant viewing. Kids like to explore. They will click on link, after link, after link. I'm carefull not to leave knives or sharp objects lying around my kids play area. Online, I would appreciate it if wikipeida took the same care. Your never going to stop stop somebody who is determined enough, but you can at least make a minimal ammount of effort to stop people randomly blundering into this stuff. Having the option to enable a warning before adult images on wikipedia would be helpful. At least I can teach my son that if he sees the warning and clicks 'continue', he will probably see something unpleasent.

As for the suggestion that parents "should monitor their children's online activity themselves" - the internet is no longer the PC sitting in the living room, where you can sit down for a family browsing session! Its phones, tablets and TV's. Its at home, friends houses, its at school and in shops. In 2012, "monitoring my childrens online activity" is already difficult. By 2017 is going to be impossible.

drivebyacct26• 14 years ago

You must be too old to have had the internet as a child/teen to be this naive. Besides, no where do you justify the crusade to keep your children from seeing naked parts of peoples' bodies. It's taboo because you make it. If your child stumbles upon something, congratulations, they're a "netizen". Education is more important than censorship and shielding.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

Wikipedia has no trouble finding people who want to contribute and there are obviously plenty of eyes on the porn. Coding up a "yeah, this is porn" button doesn't seem like an enormously unthinkable amount of effort, and I have trouble imagining it would be difficult to get users to click it.

It isn't a question of whether you agree with the law. It's a question if whether non-compliance with the law is worth the cost. The benefit of having arbitrary, untagged porn on Wikipedia is what exactly? But the cost may be having Wikipedia shut down or fined into oblivion for non-compliance. Is the world a better place with a Wikipedia with the porn tagged and optionally filtered, or with a Wikipedia-shaped hole and for-pay Britannica and Encarta sites fighting over the domain? It's quite possible that those are the real choices, and a Wikipedia as we know it today simply isn't on the menu.

unimpressive2• 14 years ago

>It isn't a question of whether you agree with the law.

What laws?

(Serious question.)

yb663• 14 years ago

Since we're talking about Wikipedia, let me direct you to an article that may be helpful: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_solution_fallacy

;-)

ek• 14 years ago

This is some FUD. See WikiProject Wikipedians against censorship for why most of what this guy says is nonsense, and for information on how Wikipedia already allows institutions like public schools that may require filtering of explicit content to configure it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...

jim-greer3• 14 years ago

I don't think the filtering options you link to are realistic for public schools. They amount to configuring your browser to not show images, configure a skin which uses a blacklist of 'limited utility', or use a 3rd party proxy that gets no help from Wikipedia.

> Logged-in users can use personal cascading style sheets to display of images selectively (explained below).

> By filtering content locally, either by configuring their web browser (including the possibility to display no images at all), or by setting up a proxy (such as Privoxy) (explained below).

edit: added limited blacklist option

r0s• 14 years ago

By that logic installing and configuring all other computer systems will be equally unrealistic.

kevinchen• 14 years ago

Additionally, removing offensive images is directly against Wikipedia's goal of recording the sum of all human knowledge. Indecent things and ideas are important to document too.

kevinpet• 14 years ago

What does wikipedians against censorship say about him? It seems to argue against censorship.

There's a subset of wikipedia editors who seem to be constitutionally unable to differentiate between "censorship" and "discretion". Try this one on:

"Hi, this article that doesn't seem to have anything to do with nudity has a picture of a naked woman at the top, where it is particularly likely to be problematic for people browsing at work. Here is a non-nude picture that illustrates the topic of the article equally well. Any objections to changing it?"

If you cry censorship, you do not know what that word means.

Here's the real discussion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pregnancy/Archive_5#Not_Sa...

nostromo• 14 years ago

I can't read the article because the server is down -- but people should be aware of Larry Sanger's history regarding Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

c4urself• 14 years ago

I'm not sure how reliable wikipedia's page on a critic of wikipedia is.

MartinCron3• 14 years ago

but people should be aware of Larry Sanger's history regarding Wikipedia

Which boils down to "Wikipedia critic is critical of Wikipedia."

mafro• 14 years ago

Reading the background on this Sanger does bring his post on Wikipedia's "problem" into a new light.

Perhaps he still has an axe to grind?

kijin2• 14 years ago

tl;dr: Former philosophy professor who specializes in ethics and epistemology helped found Wikipedia, but got dissatisfied with Wikipedia's "lack of respect for expertise". He leaves Wikipedia, and ever since then, he's been highly critical of any aspect of Wikipedia that he thinks detracts from its credibility. This credibility, of course, is to be measured by traditional professional standards such as (surprise, surprise!) lack of "porn".

Nothing new there. There is a certain paradigm at the intersection of ethics and epistemology that makes it extremely difficult for people to appreciate that a repository of information can be valuable even if it does not explicitly recognize formal expertise. Adherents of this view always demand formal criteria for inclusion and exclusion, and believe that an absence of such formal criteria will inevitably lead to failure. The possibility that armchair philosophers will never be able to come up with criteria that work as well as the combined effect of a million ordinary edits never seems to cross their mind.

I could go on and on about how harmful this paradigm is (I wrote my PhD thesis on the very same topic, and yes, I'm a philosophy major) but I'll stop here because it quickly gets boring.

aDemoUzer• 14 years ago

It is not a problem. Let's move on.

MartinCron3• 14 years ago

What's with the title change? There's a difference in intent between describing a "porn problem" and a "mature content" problem.

lazugod• 14 years ago

Because "Wikipedia's porn problem" is a sleazy title.

tantalor2• 14 years ago

This discussion is absurd. If an institution wanted to filter Wikipedia, they could copy it en masse and just leave out the naughty bits. I don't think the license could forbid that.

The fact of the matter is that censorship is not trivial. The cost of filtering should be burdened by the censors, not the Wikimedia Foundation itself.

Edit: Jim Greer points out that Wikipedia actually does suggest using proxies for censorship, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Options_to_not_see_an...

jim-greer3• 14 years ago

I think the issue boils down to whether kids will accidentally come across porn - the author presents a very misleading example of a search result for 'male human'. When I search for that I get a high-quality porn-free page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_human.

If kids are actively looking for porn, they are going to find it. Now, it would be nice for public schools with strict white list based domain filters to be able to include Wikipedia as a safe site.

its_so_on• 14 years ago

Nothing. It's an encyclopedia.

drivebyacct26• 14 years ago

I love the comments. I can't keep my kids from seeing porn, so let's censor Wikipedia. The logic, is just... breathtaking.

jpxxx• 14 years ago

Truly, points to the author: he cloaked his loathing well. His concern lies somewhere between misguided and malicious.

So to the heart of this issue: What "extremely explicit" "disgusting" "pornographic" "adult content" is he referring to?

• close-up photographs of ordinary intercourse

Oh. Foundational information on a fundamental, universal behavior that propagates the human species. Yes, there's no reason "the children" should ever be allowed to define human intercourse or put it in a coherent context - best to just let them discover sex from a blinking pink banner ad.

What does this fool actually want?

benjohnson• 14 years ago

There's no problem at all.

I created a content filtering firewall for conservative Lutheran elementary school to using Dan's Guardian and it's naughty word filter.

Problem solved in 30 minutes, and the children get to see 99% of Wikipedia, including topics like "Breast Cancer."

When we were testing the filter, we found that occasionally a topic with a slightly naughty photo may come up from time to time, but nothing you couldn't find in a National Geographic. We didn't care to filter it any more.

Want to do it yourself: Endian firewall on a VM.

What should we do about Wikipedia's mature content problem?

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