4 ms·

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

44 points by lazugod 14y ago

Kliment 14y 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.
- tantalor 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
  - unimpressive 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - kijin 14y ago
ek 14y 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_Wikipedians_against_censorship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...
- jim-greer 14y 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 14y ago
    By that logic installing and configuring all other computer systems will be equally unrealistic.
- kevinchen 14y 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 14y 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_Safe_For_Work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pregnancy/Archive_5#Not_Sa...
nostromo 14y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- c4urself 14y ago
  I'm not sure how reliable wikipedia's page on a critic of wikipedia is.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  but people should be aware of Larry Sanger's history regarding Wikipedia Which boils down to "Wikipedia critic is critical of Wikipedia."
- mafro 14y 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?
- kijin 14y 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.
roguecoder 14y ago
Try looking up "masturbation" in the Encyclopedia Britannica sometime. On the up side it did teach at least one young boy what the clitoris is, since it gave equal time to male and female masturbatory techniques. I don't think we should erase human sexuality from an encyclopedia because we are afraid that children might be able to research those parts of human society. It is not being used to exploit children, and such information may encourage kids to actually do research when they are curious. It is not as though they are being sent to these photos by someone else: they are there if the kids go looking. They are going to find info somewhere; I'd much rather it was on Wikipedia than actual porn sites. If the articles were factually inaccurate I would take umbrage, but that does not seem to be the case.
aDemoUzer 14y ago
It is not a problem. Let's move on.
MartinCron 14y ago
What's with the title change? There's a difference in intent between describing a "porn problem" and a "mature content" problem.
- lazugod 14y ago
  Because "Wikipedia's porn problem" is a sleazy title.
tantalor 14y 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_image#Use_a_proxy_filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Options_to_not_see_an...
jim-greer 14y 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 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 14y ago
Nothing. It's an encyclopedia.
drivebyacct2 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.

44 points by lazugod 14y 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.

tantalor 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- unimpressive 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- kijin 14y ago

ek 14y 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_Wikipedians_against_censorship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Wikipedia...

jim-greer 14y 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 14y ago
  By that logic installing and configuring all other computer systems will be equally unrealistic.
kevinchen 14y 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 14y 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_Safe_For_Work http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Pregnancy/Archive_5#Not_Sa...

nostromo 14y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
c4urself 14y ago
I'm not sure how reliable wikipedia's page on a critic of wikipedia is.
MartinCron 14y ago
but people should be aware of Larry Sanger's history regarding Wikipedia Which boils down to "Wikipedia critic is critical of Wikipedia."
mafro 14y 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?
kijin 14y 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.

roguecoder 14y ago

Try looking up "masturbation" in the Encyclopedia Britannica sometime. On the up side it did teach at least one young boy what the clitoris is, since it gave equal time to male and female masturbatory techniques. I don't think we should erase human sexuality from an encyclopedia because we are afraid that children might be able to research those parts of human society. It is not being used to exploit children, and such information may encourage kids to actually do research when they are curious. It is not as though they are being sent to these photos by someone else: they are there if the kids go looking. They are going to find info somewhere; I'd much rather it was on Wikipedia than actual porn sites. If the articles were factually inaccurate I would take umbrage, but that does not seem to be the case.

aDemoUzer 14y ago

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

MartinCron 14y ago

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

lazugod 14y ago
Because "Wikipedia's porn problem" is a sleazy title.

tantalor 14y 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_image#Use_a_proxy_filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Options_to_not_see_an...

jim-greer 14y 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 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 14y ago

Nothing. It's an encyclopedia.

drivebyacct2 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.