User talk:Jimbo Wales

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I'm fed up

I will not denote anymore money to Wikimedia fundraising and tell the others follow suit because of how passively the issue of pornography in Commons being handled. Commons is being infected by a cancer called exhibitionism FOR YEARS. I see no point to increase more servers just to preserve those totally utterly useless media files. I will not pity its death by the hands of Commons admins, they're the same as US gun defenders. This disease is incurable already because no one had the vision to stop it earlier. This is not an appeal, because I expect nothing from you. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 01:54, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

If nothing can be done, then de-associate WMF (and Wikipedia) from the Commons. It's a mess. Dump them. Let them do whatever the hell they want but let them do it under their own name, not under WMF/Jimbo's name. As a long time contributor to this project I resent the fact that I even get associated with that place simply because en-Wikipedia and Commons have something in ... common. The same sentiment has been expressed in the past by other long time contributor's and en-Wikipedia members like User:Risker who said that she never goes on Commons because she always "feels dirty" even stepping over there. I think most responsible editors here feel the same way. It's a big ugly stain on the people who are working to create a serious free reference work.Volunteer Marek 03:40, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Same with me, I rarely venture over to commons and never ever ever go there at work (unlike Wikipedia and Wiktionary which is a staple at my job). Kumioko (talk) 03:42, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Commons looks more and more as a free porno site. The question is, if English Wikipedia is any better: [1] [2];[3];[4];[5];[6] and so on, and so on. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 04:05, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

IP, are you complaining that you went to an encyclopaedia, looked up sexual topics and found sexual images there? Oh my god, however could they be there! In articles about the subject! This is a disgrace!

As ever, don't search for "porn" and you're unlikely to find it. -mattbuck (Talk) 07:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Mattbuck, Encyclopedia Britannica has no article about scrotal inflation, and what a disgrace(!) it has no article about erotic electrostimulation either. Does it make it less of encyclopedia? 76.126.142.59 (talk) 13:47, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, it does make it less of an encyclopedia. Coverage of such topics in one aspect where WP is superior. --Cyclopia^talk 15:52, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

That is a nicely absurd position to take. And one which I find so unconvincing as to US and international law that I suggest the WMF staff would find it ludicrous as well. Collect (talk) 08:03, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

I find nothing illegal with his point of view? Please explain how pornography has now become illegal everywhere overnight? 99.39.113.250 (talk) 12:46, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Try looking up laws about child pornography etc. I suggest you will find it is generally regarded as "illegal." Really. Collect (talk) 15:55, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Given this line originated from the argument that one is unlikely to find porn without looking for it, I am at a loss to understand how this is anything but a red herring. Resolute 16:02, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Innocent searches are irrelevant to the original complaint here; indeed, the ongoing work to keep this material by hiding it from casual users emphasizes how much of it appears to be irrelevant to any encyclopedia and is just Flickr with even looser rules. It's hardly surprising that the majority of the world, whose standards are less prurient than ours, would object to having their money used to fund someone's stash of objectionable and unencyclopedic material. Mangoe (talk) 18:20, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Are there complaints from people who search for some subject unrelated to sex, who get wrongly directed to pages with explicit sexual images? Or is this simply about not wanting to have an encyclopedia that contains topics on sexual matters with explicit images in as much detail as any other subject? Count Iblis (talk) 12:55, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Don't get me wrong. I'm totally fine with "pornographic article" with proper image to assist it as long as the article is well sourced. I can't stand that Commons admins constantly insist images uploaded by exhibitionists to be "useful IMO". Those images are hardly useful in any Wikimedia project. I've suggested that sensitive image with no chance of being rationally used in other project's article should be deleted, but this suggestion has been taken lightly or challenged by Commons admins/defenders with "it's only useless in YOUR opinion" or something like that. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 13:33, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Commons acts as the central repository for Wikimedia projects, but its scope is not limited to Wikimedia. I'm not going to defend the need for dozens of penis pictures, but I don't find "it's not used on Wikipedia" to be an outstanding argument in general. Resolute 14:44, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

I said "it's not used on any Wikimedia project". More importantly, when has Commons become the repository for projects outside of Wikimedia? I only find such argument solely justifies that dozens of unused penis pictures. I just don't understand, if someone wants to publicize their own penis or vulva, why it has to be Wikimedia Commons? There are dozens of more appropriate websites to host those images. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 15:13, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikimedia Commons is a media file repository making available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. It acts as a common repository for the various projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, but you do not need to belong to one of those projects to use media hosted here. And if you are going to view everything as black and white absolutes, then this discussion really won't be worth continuing. Like I said, I won't defend the need for as many such images as we do have, but an argument for deletion of "unused at Wikimedia" isn't a qualifying delete rationale in my view. Resolute 15:26, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

I read it differently from your interpretation. "You can use the files as you please" doesn't mean "you can upload the files as you please". Again, I don't want my donation spent to support those exhibitionists, that's my bottom line. -- Sameboat - 同舟 (talk) 15:36, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

That's fine, I won't tell you how to spend your money. But in a project with 17 million images and millions of articles in 200 languages, the "exhibitionism problem" is really quite small in the grand scheme of things. Resolute 15:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

This points to the general dilemma. Any reflective person would probably agree that a free repository of educational images would have some images that they themselves find offensive, even substantially offensive, like some of these. So, how to deal with that. Probably the ones who view, keep, and maintain such images should be more sensitive to that, and the ones who find them offensive should be more tolerant. Both stances would be easier if there was more meeting in the middle. The WMF, however, appears to be the only one in a position to mediate. Alanscottwalker (talk) 15:53, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Barf. Commons does not "make available public domain and freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language". It scrapes content from other sites. If Wikimedia Commons did not exist the images would still exist and would still be available elsewhere. There are 100s of websites that host poor quality amateur porn. For each image on wikimedia commons there are 1000s of others in the same category, of better quality(NSFW), and almost certainly with better descriptions. The sex content on this site is woefully inadequate, and most likely wrong, it tends to dwell on the bizarre, freakish, and sensationalist, at the expense of what most people do. Any one that says the sex content on WP is in any way educational is either lying or deluded. John lilburne (talk) 20:27, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, there have been many complaints that sexualized imagery pops up in unexpected places on the Commons, such as searches for "skittles" or "toothbrush". Tarc (talk) 13:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

That's probably a matter of incorrect categorisation, should be quite simple to fix. Does Commons have an equivalent of our New Page Patrol that can fix such problems proactively. Is there a specific category for images of an "adult" or NSFW nature, which can be used as a filter by those who need it? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 15:15, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately no, it's due to the search engine. We do have a category "Nude or partially nude people with electric toothbrushes" so that nude images don't show in the main toothbrushes category, but the only way to stop such images showing when you search for toothbrushes would be to remove the string "toothbrush" from the file completely, which rather goes against the point of having such an image to begin with. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:46, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

And what encyclopedic purpose does a nude person brushing their teeth serve...or is something that need not be repeated here going on with these toothbrushes?--MONGO 17:29, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

The file name should be enough for you: File:Woman masturbating with improvised vibrator.jpg. It was originally known as File:Masturbating with a toothbrush.jpg although User:Mike Peel renamed it after the search results became a topic of discussion elsewhere. All too frequently, the specific examples raised are dealt with like this but the general problem remains unaddressed. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 17:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Precisely as I expected.--MONGO 18:16, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

"Encyclopedic purpose" is irrelevant, Commons is separate from the hundreds of encyclopedias hosted by the WMF. Images on Commons can be used for any purpose. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 18:21, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, people bring this up from time to time, that the vast Commons repository is for the world to link to and make use of. I'm curious about the licensing though, how do the Commons staff and admins and such verify that the CC-BY-SA is being adhered to by non-WMF entities? Tarc (talk) 18:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

They wouldn't, any more than they spend time verifying that our encyclopedic content is being used in compliance with the license. It is up to the uploader (who owns the license) to enforce it, if they so choose. Resolute 18:50, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

So if an image of a topless woman is scraped off of, say, Flickr, that is where any responsibility ends? I then create a website that charges for access to pictures of topless women, with links back to Commons-hosted images. As long as the original Flickr uploader doesn't show up to complain, Commons is golden? Tarc (talk) 18:58, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

This is kind of off-topic but can't all pictures there be used commercially? That would leave attribution, which if the link is back to Commons gives the attribution. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:16, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

You would want to talk to a lawyer about the legalities of it, but my understanding is that yes, Commons would be okay from that perspective. If the image is licensed CC-BY-SA and we are properly attributing the file and properly licensing any derivatives, then yes, WMF should be okay. When you license CC-BY-SA, you are explicitly allowing commercial reuse. If subsequent reusers are violating the terms, then that is an issue between that reuser and the copyright holder. I have several of my images reused elsewhere. Most that I have seen have credited me. Of those that haven't, I chose not to make a big deal out of it. But that was my choice, and ultimately my responsibility as the copyright holder. Resolute 19:19, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Is commons separately funded and run? If not, then it isn't separate. Also, our own article claims that "Given its primary function as a supporting project for the other Wikimedia web sites, the main content policy for files uploaded to Commons is that they must be potentially useful on any of the Wikimedia projects." That seems to me to be in conflict with the assertion that "encyclopedic purpose is irrelevant." Mangoe (talk) 19:02, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Encyclopedic purpose is irrelevant...then what's the purpose of Commons. This sort of thing is not what I've used it for. The image linked by DC above does not indicate the age of the person, nor is the image used on en.wiki.--MONGO 19:17, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Commons' purpose is educational content, not encyclopedic. The definition of "educational" can be as broad or narrow as anyone wishes to make it, however. Resolute 19:21, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

First, that's in conflict with the statement I've quoted, which I have to think has better authority behind it than your opinion; and second, I do not agree that "educational" is devoid of meaning. In particular, I'm quite happy to make the claim that the disputed images are not educational, and I would guess that a typical person would make the same assessment. Mangoe (talk) 19:39, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

It is only in conflict because the Wikipedia article is imprecise. I am quoting from Commons' own policies. Also, images of nudity and sexuality, as a broad category, are educational. In a very broad encyclopedia, such as Wikipedia, then a broader range of images likewise qualify (much in the same way that we have millions of articles you'll never find in a traditional encyclopedia). That the meaning can be argued in a broad sense does not render it "devoid of meaning". Resolute 19:56, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

"But it's educational" is the kind of lame excuse boarding school boys used to give to masters when their stash of girlie magazines was uncovered in room inspections. Images of nudity and sexuality are not intrinsically educational simply by showing those subjects, and indeed are as a rule not educational except in certain narrowly defined contexts. It seems to me that the properties which render an image "unencyclopedic" are precisely those which render it "not educational", even in a very broad sense. "Educational" is not a "get out of having to justify" card. Mangoe (talk) 20:19, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Well...once we head down the censorship path we never know where it will end. The main concern is whether we hosting images of underage subjects and the liability that comes from that.--MONGO 20:27, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

If that Project is going to rely on consensus-editorial-discretion to determine "educational," as it has been set up to do, it is likely it will get a broad definition, approaching, "able to convey information" and "not illegal." -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 20:33, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I disagree on the argument of being intrinsically educational. Also, Commons, by its nature, does not provide context. I think most would agree that placing an image of someone's breasts in the breast article can be expected to use that image in an educational context. By extension, any image of breasts can become similarly educational, and therefore fits Commons' scope. Likewise, as long as we have articles like exhibitionism, then exhibitionist images can easily fit within the scope of "it's educational". There aren't many image types that can't be made to fit this scope. The real issue, imnsho, is not the value of an individual image or of a single category of images, but the number. A hundred individual penis images can be argued as having educational merit. The single category of penis images can as well. But the question really should be "do we need 100 images?" I think framing the debate along these lines has been attempted before, but my (unsupported) recollection is that these debates usually end up polarized and trainwrecked. Resolute 20:45, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

That's a signal that the community is incompetent— not necessarily because individual members are so, but because the decision-making process allows its exploitation by those to whom it is advantageous to prevent it from setting any standards. Mangoe (talk) 20:45, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

If there's an entire Commons category for images of people masturbating with electric toothbrushes then I think that probably tells you more about the place that a couple of megabytes of circular arguing on here. Black Kite (talk) 20:37, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

It is an entire category of one single image, created on the grounds of principle of least astonishment. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:22, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Cos obviously no other solution was available like the delete button. I don't suppose that just placing it under female masturbation was a possibility either. Its a wonder it wasn't catted as "Nude or partially nude people with electric toothbrushes in right hand, lying on a green mat, wearing a gold coloured watch on the left wrist, and with ceramic tiles in the background". John lilburne (talk) 21:38, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

That it's a toothbrush is rather important to the image, so no it should not just be under female masturbation. As for deletion, iirc it survived several DRs on the grounds that improvised vibrators are a common thing. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:52, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

I need to point out here that the issue of separability is being ignored in this. If the community cannot come up with a standard of "educational" that has any teeth, I expect that individual donors can, and that it would not be "Flickr with no content standards whatsoever." I see no reason to hurt funding for other WMF projects simply because Commons is really nothing more than a media webhost. Mangoe (talk) 20:52, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

How are Wikimedia, as a secondary producer, and the editors uploading this material, as secondary or primary producers, in compliance with the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act, which is the law of the land? Who is keeping the detailed records of the performers to ensure that they are of legal age? Whether you like the law or not, it is the law, and it could be enforced at any time. Jehochman ^Talk 20:59, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

The uploaders are in the frame, those taking part in the discussions are in the frame, those exercising judgement calls over the content are in the frame. The WMF is behind the sofa claiming "Not us Guv! its them over there, and here are the names IP addresses etc". John lilburne (talk) 21:09, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

That would be an interesting prosecution, as in who is prosecuted and who has to keep it. Someone mentioned above the Flickr "has standards." What are those? Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:08, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

Yahoo T&C

You agree to not use the Services to: a. upload, post, email or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libellous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

and they uphold them whenever a breach comes to their notice. Screw with flickr and you are likely to lose every photo you uploaded there. Screw with yahoo and you'll lose your email accounts, really screw with yahoo and everything you ever posted on any yahoo site will be scrubbed. John lilburne (talk) 21:20, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

All-in all, that is kinda vague, as these things often seem to be. That second link you give for Flickr has this to say: "If people want to publish content that's not suitable for children (or would be generally offensive to most people) they may. Then, it becomes member choice to elect to see that sort of content, using SafeSearch (or not using it, in this case). Note that this doesn't mean illegal or prohibited content is OK - it's definitely not." That's not much standard. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:29, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

They do blank out some material if you aren't logged in, so it isn't the case that all material uploaded is visible to everyone. Mangoe (talk) 02:37, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

They allow general adult content so long as it is appropriately tagged as such. If someone is incapable of doing that then they'll do it by marking the entire account adult. Non logged in users, those identified to yahoo as under 18, and Germans cannot see adult content. Others get to chose, so they can browse at work with safe switched on, and browse at home with it switched off. Otherwise yahoo has types of content that they will not allow examples are incest, shit play, racism, sexualisation of kids, voyeur content where the person photographed is unaware that they are being photopgraphed, upskirts and down blouse stuff. Basically if you want to be an arse to other people then go do it some place else, I think Commons has been mentioned as that place from time to time. John lilburne (talk) 07:11, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

OK. To construct a list of defined prohibited content, a site needs an editorial controller to make a list. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:07, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps but Y! has no published public list as to what is or is not acceptable. For example, a documentary type photograph of kids smoking is OK, an account that has a lot of photos of kids smoking will be deleted. Y! does not countenance the glorification of kids smoking falls under the category 'harmful' above. BDSM images are OK but not when it involves blood. Using cucumbers as sex toys, or fisting images, are similarly not allowed. Accounts that appear to be offering services or hookups are another no go area. Again there is no published list, probably to avoid people prodding at the boundaries, this is just what has been observed by a number of people over a number of years. Yahoo has a Corporate or editorial policy over what it wants to be associated with. In many ways it is fairly liberal and flickr probably contains the largest collection of adult material outside of a dedicated porn portal, in others it is surprisingly conservative. WMF similarly needs to be clear as to what it wants to be associated with. Whether it wants to be a site that hosts jailbait or anyoneup type content. John lilburne (talk) 16:10, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Right. Which means it takes editorial control to define and enforce the policy. Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:22, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

The secrecy of the list (or the deliberate lack of definable criteria) seems to be a universal characteristic of censorship wherever it is applied, public or private. This is one reason why censorship is invariably the tool of villains; because the lack of definition means that there is no possible way that it can be defined to exclude purely self-serving, politically motivated attacks. It also means that there is no way that anyone posting can ever know that he will not get into trouble, which further reinforces the importance of his being personally agreeable to the censor. Nonetheless, censorship fails at every purpose, or else we would never have been able to make headway against it, because there is an innate spark of goodness in the human spirit that no censor can ever predict or encompass, which must eventually unravel every scheme. Wnt (talk) 17:31, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I let some people into my apartment and don't let others. I have no definable criteria for deciding who I will let in. It's entirely up to me, which means that if I want to refuse to let someone in for a self-serving, politically-motivated reason there's no way to prove that. Still, it's the only practical way to decide who gets to be in my apartment. Ken Arromdee (talk) 20:49, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, but who said Commons was your apartment and not my apartment? or the apartment of the people who actually do watch over its content and generally get rid of many troublesome things at substantial personal legal risk. Wnt (talk) 21:18, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Yahoo own the servers. Their rules. They decide what they are comfortable with hosting. They don't go looking for non-compliant content. But they react when it is brought to their attention. The result is that the "getting it on" crowd and the "ducks and bunnies" crowd can mostly intermingle without a huge fight breaking out across the site. Several years ago there were 100s of accounts where someone had followed some women as she walked through the mall photographing her arse. Or they'd hung out around the parking lot snatch photos of women bending over to stow their shopping/kids. You don't tend to see that so much. There are still fuckwads posting crude comments on photos of someone's teenage kid, they don't stay around so long. John lilburne (talk) 19:31, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

Wnt, pens and paper are also "invariably the tool[s] of villains", so I simply do not see the logic. It's difficult, usually even impossible to draw absolute lines between acceptable and unacceptable human behavior, but so what? It has never stopped anyone from placing any given act on one side or the other. "Wikimedia is not censored" is not the same as "Wikimedia has no standards other than those the law thrusts upon us." I don't don't think that the latter is really adhered to anyway. There's only so far I have time to go wading through commons looking for stuff (especially with the risk of displaying something that someone else in the room is going to object to) but my impression is that the offensive material in question is being protected from review because it is offensive, whereas if it were more innocuous the fact of its lack of utility would be brought to bear. We delete tons of stuff off the English Wikipedia not because it's offensive but because it's useless, e.g. old user pics and various other random pictures which nobody is ever going to link to. I don't run across a lot of this stuff on commons so it's pretty clear that either people don't bother to upload it, or it's getting deleted quickly and without fuss. Mangoe (talk) 20:43, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

It seems to me that if someone wants to post nude images they don't have a hard job finding them. And it doesn't seem to matter what the subject is either. Frankly who is going to source erotica from Commons, even if they are into dicks, Commons is hardly the place one would go for choice. They should concentrate on curating quality images that are educational instead of curating dumb shit that perhaps a dozen sad gits are ever going to use. Then when kids look for photos of Prince Albert or Pearl Necklace then that is what they get even with safe search off. John lilburne (talk) 22:02, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I haven't read the voluminous threads on this subject, but let me ask a silly question. Why doesn't the Foundation step in and say, "no"? The Foundation needs to be the adult in the room and say, "no, we're not running a pornography website here". You're never going to convince people to change their moral values and if someone sees no problem with hosting pornography in plain view of children on something that's supposed to be an encyclopedia, no amount of rehashing this topic is going to make them see the light. The Foundation needs to be the adult in the room, require that useless explicit files be deleted, and require that the ones retained be completely excludable by some sort of filter. How hard would it be to add an extension to MediaWiki that if you search for a term that returns an image in category:xyz will omit those images and prompt you to either opt in or opt out at that point, and store a cookie with your choice? For those who absolutely have to have their wikiporn, this makes you click on one more button to get to it. I've never understood the logic that just because Wikipedia/Commons is not censored, everyone who uses it is now required to submit to seeing casual porn if they accidentally click on the wrong thing. I'm sure that the same people who want Wikipedia/Commons to be a porn site will then want to argue that there's no difference between an encyclopedic image of nudity (like the one found at human body) vs the closeups of pierced genitalia with semen, but I would think that the adults in the room could make the differentiation. It's time for an adult to step in and just fix the problem. --B (talk) 23:08, 14 May 2013 (UTC)

I wish you could understand why we find it annoying for you to declare yourself the adult and us the children, when you're the one who can't bear to look at routine images of the human body and we're the ones who don't have a problem with it, and haven't had a problem with it for a full decade now, with no sky fallen. Wnt (talk) 00:58, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Of course, this completely misses the point. We're not talking about routine images of the human body. Human body has routine images of the human body. We're talking about obscene images on an educational site. Why is it that a simple one-click opt-in/opt-out is a horrible infringement on your right to see Commons porn? --B (talk) 11:56, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

B, you maybe haven't met Wnt here before if you're surprised at his completely missing the point. He elevates it to an artform in discussions like this. You were correct when you said "if someone sees no problem with hosting pornography in plain view of children on something that's supposed to be an encyclopedia, no amount of rehashing this topic is going to make them see the light". So we're left with appeals to authority in the form of Jimbo (who agrees but says he can't act), and the WMF. I think the "adults" you are looking for are behind the sofa, avoiding the ringing of the phone and the doorbell on this one. Begoon ^talk 12:09, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Wnt,in his usual hamfisted way, is try to make the following point:

If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man has dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html

He's hoping for a sledge come Christmas. John lilburne (talk) 12:26, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Heh - nice illustration. He can have my sledge. I prefer a nice solid set of stairs. You can go whichever way you decide on those. I've even been known to turn around halfway down and go back for something I forgot. Begoon ^talk 13:31, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Wnt, I understand it perfectly: I have teenagers in the house, and they continually express their annoyance when I call them on the use of that particular rhetorical device. I don't feel in any way constrained by your personal failure to hold to any standard, but I also don't believe that the people who are uploading this stuff think that it's innocuous. I suspect that most if not all of them know that it isn't innocuous, and that at least part of the reason it is being uploaded is because it isn't innocuous. It's ironic that I find myself in this discussion while I've been reading a memoir/history of a faculty member from my high school, because it's the same battle all over again. I remember myself weaselling out of one particular disciplinary infraction on some legalistic grounds, when there was no question that I had committed the act and no issue that the fellow who caught me was in a position to object to it. No, B is precisely right in identifying the problem is that lack of any adult supervision. Mangoe (talk) 12:16, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

What you're calling "adulthood" is the acceptance of a specific set of cultural taboos that only certain people believe in. If for some people you know it is correlated with increasing age, that is only because your taboos are in conflict with the state of nature. If people were entirely free from such mad ideology, they would have the right to stroll through the gates of Eden, and (among other things) they would do so naked.

The cost of your proposal, however, would be high - despite claims above, there really isn't any difference between showing a penis to illustrate the anatomy and showing it exhibitionistically; it still looks the same. If we begin concealing articles about sexual topics from children, the inevitable cost will be unwanted pregnancies and lethal disease. Pornography infects no one. We cannot accept your agenda without agreeing to make a blood sacrifice. Wnt (talk) 16:56, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

You gotta hand it to B. We should have stopped with "if someone sees no problem with hosting pornography in plain view of children on something that's supposed to be an encyclopedia, no amount of rehashing this topic is going to make them see the light". I'd reply, Wnt, but experience tells me that when I hear that funny music and Rod Serling's voice, and things start turning black and white, it might not be worth continuing. A bientot. Begoon ^talk 17:10, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Wnt, even in what you are saying there is a difference, because one illustration is anatomical illustration, and the other is a bold strike against prudery. I to hold that the latter is an adolescent act. As soon as you said "articles", you lost your momentum, as you know very well that the articles are not the issue (though I find the enthusiasm for, um, atypical sexual practices telling in its way). No, it's the smut that was created as such and uploaded as such and which will never see inclusion in any article, not even in articles about smut, which is most supremely indefensible except through childish arguments about defying authority. Mangoe (talk) 18:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

It would appear it is your faction which is interested in defying Commons' authority right now, not ours. The WMF remains inscrutable, but requires no 'defying' by us right now either. The user base showed no particular interest in even a voluntary opt-in image hiding, let alone a purge of whatever you don't like today from Commons, so I see no reason for any of that to change in the near or far future. Wnt (talk) 20:05, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

To stick with the image I've been using: commons has "authority" the way a class full of sophomores gains authority when the teacher steps out of the room. Mangoe (talk) 02:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

So the guy who sets up the classroom, writes the textbook, and does the teaching is the "sophomore", and the one who does nothing but condemn the whole school because he disagrees on a doctrine is the "teacher"? There's something very al-Qaida-on-girls-schools about that. Wnt (talk) 02:54, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

You don't get it; things clearly aren't going to improve soon; I'm done here. Mangoe (talk) 13:28, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Gee, if only Wikimedia had a full-time lawyer employed to handle legal issues. It's too bad we have to rely on anonymous laypeople to interpret U.S. law for us. And on a related note, Wikimedia hosts detailed information on how to construct nuclear weapons and how to produce/obtain all manner of lethal poisons. What educational value does this have?! Wikipedia is out of control!!! --108.38.191.162 (talk) 21:41, 13 May 2013 (UTC)

A message for wikipediocracy users

This seemed the fastest way to reach you. In this topic you say you found a photo of me with a water balloon. As you might have noticed, the person pictured doesn't have the same name as me, and that's because it's not me. Also, by posting it to imgur without attribution or a link back to flickr you violated the terms of the CC-BY-SA-2.0 licence. Cease and desist. -mattbuck (Talk) 07:08, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

How can it be possible that a holder of advanced permissions on a wikimedia project can come to Jimmy's talk page and commit blatant violations of WP:CIVIL and WP:NPA? Why is this OK? Aren't we supposed to be better than this? InconvenientCritic (talk) 11:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

(EC) Ironic, as the fastest way to get action on many things on wikipedia is to post it on wikipediocracy. Per the terms of the CC-BY-SA licence, attribution needs to be provided where/when the image is published/disseminated etc to the public, and available on request. Due to the nature of online storage (and even corporate cloud-based storage) this is not always where the image is actually hosted/located. This is somewhat of a grey area regarding CC-BY-SA-2.0 which they have still not worked out. Online data storage is not, as per the terms of the CC-BY-SA licence, strictly 'publishing' or even disseminating as they define it until its actually linked to. The thread you linked makes the attribution perfectly clear. Also web forums are rarely responsible for the content of their contributors except under certain circumstances. Like the WMF, most of them off-load the legal implications to the contributor. So wikipediocracy is no more responsible for its members posts than the WMF is (legally) responsible for commons porn stash. Tell me, are you keeping up to date records of the age of the models in the adult pictures you upload to commons? As its your legal responsibility under US law to do so, even if you scrape them from flickr, not the WMF's or the original flickr uploader. But if you wanted to reach the individual you feel is violating the CC-BY-SA licence, you could have just, you know, messaged them since you clearly are watching the forum. Instead of doing the usual commons deflection tactic of by screaming 'bad people at wpo!' when under the spotlight. Its kind of a shame really, as Jimbo's views on commons fall neatly in line with most of the critics at wikipediocracy, if they could all be sat down for a nice meal they could probably work out their differences. Only in death does duty end (talk) 08:35, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Note that as explained at Commons:Help:Sexual content and in particular [7] the exceptional claims regarding 2257 enforcement are pure threat and chilling effect without a valid legal basis. WMF Counsel actually considered the question and gave advice that Commons does not need to maintain 2257 documentation. Wnt (talk) 17:55, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

RE:copyright. You are in error. The use of this image on imgur is clearly a copyvio, as a staticflickr link does provide neither credit nor license information, both required per CC-BY. In my country, courts have decided that even merely hosting an image on your server (without showing it on your web surface) constitutes copyright infringement. --Túrelio (talk) 09:24, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

(EC) Unfortunately its not the same in every country regarding hosting. Hence 'grey area'. The laws around linking are even more murky. Last time I looked the UK had about 3 conflicting court cases all with different decisions that could have gone either way. (Incidentally this caused my company to ban all CC licensed content because absolutely no one, either at the location where they were getting the pictures, or the hosts, was abiding by all the provisions of the licence.) - This discussion can go to my talkpage though if you want to continue it, I would be interested in the law you quoted regarding hosting material. Would rather not digress here too much. Only in death does duty end (talk) 09:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

You already know that they are hypocrites. They will criticize Wikipedia for copyright issues, but then ignore the fact that they are violating copyright left and right by their own actions. But do you really expect any better from them? It's because of their hypocrisy that their opinions are largely irrelevant. Silverseren^C 08:20, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

You do realize that WP doesn't properly license the CC content it hosts. John lilburne (talk) 10:27, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

SS, having looked through that thread and poked around a bit further, I see (a) one person storing an image off-site, and (b) another thread in which how they should host their own image. Besides, copyright and hosting pornography are quite distinct issues. Mangoe (talk) 11:36, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Anyone that cares knows how to get from a flickr jpg url back to the photopage anyway. But the DMCA is mattbuck's best friend. John lilburne (talk) 11:42, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Mattbuck and crew only care about copyright and personality rights when it suits them. When it does not, they fight tooth and claw to retain any image for any reason, such as Mardi Gras topless photos scraped from Flickr. The hypocrisy is astounding. Tarc (talk) 12:25, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Really? You're still astounded by it? I used to be - but it's getting too old to astound me any more. It still annoys me, but I suspect that's most of the problem, and most of the reason for doing it - because they can, and because it annoys. We need to remove the "because they can" part, imo. B hits the nail on the head in the other discussion when he points out lack of "adult" supervision as the main problem. That's the missing part of the mechanism, and that's what the infrastructure doesn't provide. I think that's largely why these discussions always end up on this page too - in a hope that Jimbo can help that framework to happen, even if he can't do it himself. Begoon ^talk 13:17, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Mattbuck is absolutely right. I do not understand why these trolls from wikipediocracy decided to use a non-free image of a different person, if Mattbuck has released this image of himself with a free license? This real image of Mattbuck (look at his face) clearly illustrates why Muttbuck left this message to the talk page of Beta_M who together with Mattbuck keeps busy voting to keep every low resolution porn image71.198.248.45 (talk) 15:32, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

To clear things up, the reason I posted here was that it seemed the easiest way to connect to wikipaedocrats in the limited time I had available this morning. I didn't make any sort of personality rights case, I simply stated that the person they were claiming was me was in fact not me. As for copyright... I'm a commons admin, so yes, I care about copyright. I don't see how anything I said counts as a personal attack, or even being incivil. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:01, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Ohhhh, I called them trolls, right. Yes, I did that. My mistake, someone changed the title on me. -mattbuck (Talk) 16:06, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Mattbuck, leaving alone everything else, but if you truly believe that Jimbo's talk page is "the easiest way to connect to wikipaedocrats", you're not competent enough to edit Wikipedia. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 16:35, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

It seems a reasonable assumption, given they practically live on this page. Resolute 18:51, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

It was that or sully myself with a wikipaedocracy account. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:09, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Someone eventually used the support@wikipediocracy.com email account Wikipediocracy created in cooperation with Commons.→StaniStani  19:17, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Hey, Mattbuck.

A cease and desist is an order or request to halt an activity (cease) and not to take it up again later (desist) or else face legal action.

We have this policy about not making legal threats. You might want to read it and then redact what you said. — Scott • talk 11:30, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

And you might read what the initial paragraph on that page says: "if you make legal threats or take legal action over a Wikipedia dispute" (bolding is mine). His remark was not about a "Wikipedia dispute", but about an external website. --Túrelio (talk) 12:08, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

You're trying to lawyer that policy into what you want it to mean. The text you quote is, in fact, from the third paragraph. Immediately before that is the unequivocal instruction "Do not issue legal threats on Wikipedia pages." That is universal. Wikipedia is not the venue for anyone to make legal threats against anyone. Period. Legal threats over Wikipedia disputes are a subset of that. — Scott • talk 12:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

And you're trying to lawyer three words, taken out of context of the overall statement, to try and... what? Resolute 13:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

WP:NLT doesn't apply when people on Wikipedia discuss suits that could be filed against third party sites for infringement of Wikipedia copyrights or trademarks. Still, it never seems to amount to much when they do. Wnt (talk) 13:51, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

• Request 'hat' of this discussion by uninvolved admin/trusted editor. I'm sure Jimbo would rather not see it here.→StaniStani  19:32, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I think we've all learned a lot from this thread, actually. Carrite (talk) 16:23, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I sure have! Crocodile Dundee couldn't have thrown a better boomerang. Hillbillyholiday ^talk 20:00, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

WP fixed for https/IPv6 pageview stats

This is just an FYI to relay the news that future stats.grok.se pageview counts are hopefully fixed now, and will, today, be re-including views via https-protocol links or any views by IPv6-format IP addresses. As promised, on 10 May 2013, by Diederik (User:Drdee) of the Analytics Team @WMF, the logged page requests were studied, and several software changes were made, to restore the pageview entries and fix related problems on 14 May, within just 4 days. I thanked him for the quick fix, as expecting a 2-week delay for some software-update cycle. Plus, note how two major populations of readers had been omitted from counts, not just https-protocol viewers (of the bogus Google-https links), but also anyone reading pages over an IPv6 address had missing pageviews.
Recent pageview tests confirmed other "missing" pageviews were not due to https-protocol omissions, because the totals were still hundreds too low after https-views had been discounted. With the recent fix to GWTW, renamed temporarily as "Gone with the Wind (1939 film)", the pageviews reported by stats.grok.se totalled only 3,600-3,800/day, as compared to former levels over 4,500/day for the GWTW film. The mystery remained about hundreds of missing readers, because we did not realize IPv6 pageviews had also been omitted. However, tonight, at 01:00 UTC, the 15 May pageview counts should return near March-2013 levels for many of the 300+ major articles which still have Google-https links, plus the thousands of other pages/images wikilinked from those articles. Meanwhile, the Google-https links remain firm (but counted) in search-results, while some Mobile-site pages "en.m.wikipedia.org/*" are still listed separately in Google, confusing many people, plus who has time to think about all these mega-problems even if they were simple, rather than intertwined complexities. More later. -Wikid77 (talk) 15:50, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

• Confirmed https pageviews resumed 14 May 2013: I have run tests (on 15 May 2013) to verify exact pageview counts for either http or https-protocol, pages or images, on both enwiki and dewiki (German WP also fixed). The pageview data logs, such as for stats.grok.se, have been fixed (at 18:44, 14 May 2013) to re-enable the https/ip6 stream to webstatscollector, where Google https-protocol links, for over 300 major enwiki articles (see stats: 201305/Email or 201305/Parabola or 201305/Shakira, and thousands of wikilinked pages), had been 55%-80% under-reported during late March, April and early May (see essay: wp:Google https links). The typical pageview counts, from March 2013, have resumed in pageviews, as 2x-3.5x times higher for https-prefix pages/images, during 15 May 2013. German WP pageviews were also fixed for different pages (see stats: /de/201305/Euklidischer Raum "Euclidean Space" or /de/201305/Oval). All https page requests had been omitted during 26 March 2013 to 18:44, 14 May 2013, and so there will be permanent low spots in the pageview stats of some pages during those 50 days (~7 weeks), for various articles, images, talk-pages, templates or categories which were viewed mostly via https-protocol links on some of those 50 days. Many thousands of pages/images were not affected, and those pageviews will seem relatively stable during that 50-day period. As of 15 May 2013, the http/https pageviews have been re-confirmed to log exactly "to the penny" and so, if a page/image was viewed 17x times during a day, it will show a total of exactly 17 pageviews for that day. -Wikid77 06:39, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

• • Seems to be OK again, thanks: First article where this was spotted is back at old levels, 4 times as high as during the past few weeks. Fram (talk) 07:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Thanks for your diligent work on this, Wikid77. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 11:53, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

• • • Well, I was surprised how many people still think pageviews are unimportant (and it took several people to keep complaining about the low pageviews to get them fixed), while some editors were decidedly ignoring or ridiculing all worries about more pages (over 600) dropping to low pageviews (including "Cancer" or "email" or "Oxygen" or "Shakira" or "Calculus" or "Lady Gaga" or "Film noir" or "Lolita" or "Alan Turing" or "American football" or "Geometry" or "Basketball" or "Hexagon" etc.). I guess we are seeing more direct evidence of the "age-old" warning: unless customers (the "readers") are directly mentioned in a computer system's goals or priorities, they will be ignored by pressures to appease worker hobbies rather than the customers. That also explains the self-focused wp:Data hoarding to create lists or giant navboxes, which few people would read. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

• Late pageviews after 23:30 seem logged next day: As another issue in verifying the exact counts for current pageviews, I have noticed several days where pageviews made after 23:30 UTC, did not get logged until the next day. I am thinking there is some time of "buffering delay" where the queue of page-request entries gets tallied, to update the daily counts for stats.grok.se, soon after midnight UTC, but that causes pageviews after 23:30-23:45 to get counted on the next calendar day. More later. -Wikid77 01:28, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed loss of new-messages notifications

Within the past weeks at wp:PUMPTECH, more people have been complaining about yet another, yet more questionable, unneeded changes to the Wikipedia user-interface features, and the omission of the age-old  new-messages barline  was noted as a problem, with the new Special:Notifications(?) stuff. Some browsers give no notification, but show instead "(1)" [message] in the menu. I am thinking, of writing a blurb, to encourage former editors to return:

"Come back again to Wikipedia, where nothing works as it used to,

except severe limits in template operation or nesting, and nothing

seems intuitive now, but there are rulespam diatribes everywhere."

I think if vandals actively invented ways to make Wikipedia more difficult or confusing, for the greatest number of editors, I can't imagine better vandalism than rejacking the user-login dialog, redropping the 180-day login to 30-day timeouts (during edit-preview), dropping the new-messages bar for user-talk, removing the special-characters copy/paste box (wp:PASTE), removing fast Classic or Nostalgia browser skin, showing 2-page rulespam for every edit, or shifting the "[edit]" button away from the right-side of headers. It reminds me of anti-virus software which is so slow and disruptive to screen formats, wanting to be installed on every computer, that it has become a virus in its own right, delaying user actions, while trying to get infected into every other computer. Meanwhile, people have begged to fix "edit-conflict" to auto-correct and simply re-insert the non-interleaved text sections, but instead, we get suppression of the new-messages bar as a so-called improvement. This has been a general mood at wp:PUMPTECH, and I think you can see why techically-minded editors view the many such changes as excessive annoyance, where they spend hours discussing ways to un-rejack the features to simulate the old operations. It has reached the point where asking for important fixes is like asking a used-car salesman to fix the brakes on a car. It's just not a priority, despite the need for reliable brakes, it does not matter enough. -Wikid77 (talk) 19:38, 15 May, 06:39, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

This is a very pessimistic complaint, and I would like to contradict it. But I can't. The orange message bar has been restored in some form, but the astonishing thing is that it was removed in the first place, (1) without adequate prior notification, (2) without any regard for the disruptive effect on new users who don't know they have a personal talk page or the fact that then vandals can claim convincingly that they did not see the warnings, (3) without a solution for the problem of lumping together talk page messages and esoteric notifications such as "someone linked to a page you created", (4) without testing the feature on screenreader users (for whom the new Echo notification is even less apparent, and appears in a confusing area near the bottom of the page).

The obvious conclusion seems to be that user interface decisions are being taken by people who have no serious understanding of Wikipedia's processes (see 2 and 3), are not doing due diligence before changing a top 10 website (see 4), and have a problem with illusory superiority (see 1). I hope I am wrong. Hans Adler 20:27, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

• We need another method to prioritize real issues and get them improved: It is only pessimistic if considered hopeless, but instead it is realistic, and there are alternatives. Obviously, it is a top priority to keep the new-messages bar (to alert for thousands of new-user "improper edits" or for busy editors who do not check talk-pages every few hours). There should have been a setting in Special:Preferences to "Hide new-messages bar" such as for admins or wikignomes who get new messages every 10 minutes. There has been massive effort invested into new features, such as the Special:Notifications to contact each user when their username gets wikilinked, so we know WP has the resources to solve problems. Again, fixing the most-common "edit conflict" scenarios to auto-correct, where a user inserts a reply message into an active talk-page or changes a few words into a re-edited article, would be a relatively simple task, compared to rewriting the user-login dialog or implementing the score-tag "<score>" (April 2013) to generate a cached-image for a printed staff of musical notes. We need to focus on bigger issues. Definitely, more people need to voice concerns at the Bugzilla-sort-out meetings, etc. -Wikid77 (talk) 00:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

You ain't seen nuthin yet: WP:FLOW. Johnuniq (talk) 00:15, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

• Fortunately the WP:FLOW software doesn't exist yet: So, people wary of WP:FLOW messages can be reminded to try LiquidThreads ("LikewiseDreads") to see how slow and rambling and no View-history provided for message edits, unable to see who changed what when. Meanwhile, focus on autocorrection for edit-conflicts. -Wikid77 (talk) 04:49, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

• Anyone who attends any sort of IT course understands the basic flow diagram - Analysis > Design > Test Implementation > Testing > Feedback > Implement Live. Uniquely amongst top 10 websites, your employees appear to have forgotten this basic concept, and instead have modified it to the following complete screw-up; Analysis (amongst no-one who actually uses the site) > Design (based on Analysis of ... er ... no-one) > Implement Live. This has therefore gained the additional stage of "everyone who actually uses the site telling them they've fucked up". Yet oddly, no-one appears to be willing to actually (a) adnit the problems, or (b) fix the problems. Well done. Black Kite (talk) 00:39, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I can see your point. I also see WMF projects as having a smaller budget and nothing to lose. Wikipedians should accept lower budget upgrades and learn to adapt to them. Turnkey upgrades are for those that can't handle driving a car for two miles with a flat tire. If you don't like the ride then get out and hitchhike.--Canoe1967 (talk) 23:31, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

• People should run for the board on a sane technology platform. Remember, the biennial Board of Trustees election is coming up. II | (t - c) 00:42, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I am thinking if more people could re-emphasize what problems bother them, and if there were a recognized list of "Top 10 New useful features" then, perhaps, the whole organization (with the developers) could easily remember, "Oh right, many people are stunned by frequent edit-conflicts, especially adding phrases into hot-topic articles, or trying to reply during a busy conversation" and so something like having an Edit-merge preview page, rather than only Edit-conflict previews, could help numerous editors to better cope when trying to update busy pages of current-affairs topics. Instead, Wikipedia seems to break down, or crater, as unable to inter-connect contributions from multiple editors when a major event occurs. We need to find more ways to prioritize important improvements, over someone-might-like-this-feature enhancements. -Wikid77 01:28, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

I assume you mean breaking news events. That is a common problem when CNN comes on at 10pm with updates and too many want to 'scoup' their edit into the article. I doubt spending time, money, and effort will ever change that. It will just be bingo as to who can edit/save fastest no matter how much we try to make a level field for all editors.--Canoe1967 (talk) 01:37, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Does Jimbo ever post on this page? (Concerns about what this page is used for)

When does User:Jimbo Wales ever get a turn to say something on his own personal User Talk page?

To my mind practically all of the topics on this page properly belong on other pages such as Help pages, Village pumps, etc. By placing some topics here I think there may be a real risk of proper established procedure being subverted and circumvented - this is effectively a "walled garden" operating outside of the procedures prescribed in various policy, administrative and guidance pages established by long standing consensus. For example when discussing a user's actions at ANI there is an definitively established requirement to notify the subject, no such onus to notify exists here. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 19:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

He closed this entire discussion, didn't he?! What the hell more ya want?! Basket _Feudalist 14:00, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes, and when ever he wants, to answer your questions. --Malerooster (talk) 20:23, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

You've answered only the relatively trivial opening question - how about addressing the far more substantive issue I'm raising? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 20:29, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Well, talk pages are for others to talk to you... -mattbuck (Talk) 20:47, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

• Jimbo has encouraged open discussions, initiated topics, or hatted/deleted off-topic rants: Jimbo has shown 101 ways to reply (or not) about topics on this talk-page. There is a spirit of wp:IAR, so feel free to contact the accused, or redact insults which others have posted here at times. I think many people perhaps misunderstand what happens on this talk-page, and do not recall Jimbo has invited open talks, here, and explained how he periodically reads (perhaps "speed-reads") topics here, sometimes following "75-reply" threads in excruciating detail which would zone out insomniacs on a caffeine IV tube, or else retro-reading threads which were archived after a few days, and choses whether to reply here, or some linked forum, or email, or hat the off-topic tangents, or just keep silent. However, Jimbo also reads several other discussion pages frequently, on other websites, and judges when to comment, or not. So, just imagine someone with an I.Q. of 250 or whatever it takes to speed-read this whole page (carefully!) and ponder the endless issues, or prioritize when to remind someone their actions are out-of-line with proper decorum. Many threads here are also (concurrently) being discussed in typical forums for each topic. Perhaps read some talk-archive pages: /Archive_132 or /Archive_120 or /Archive_110 (or such) and scan for responses. I think you will be amazed at the detailed responses amid a vast sea of topics, while Jimbo also reads various outside sources about those subjects. Also, this is not a substitute for the established WP forums. -Wikid77 (talk) 23:57, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Inappropriately named files on Commons

Hi Jimmy, thanks for coming across to Commons to advise us that some images need renaming. You are right that naming our male genitalia photos with "cock" in the name is probably not appropriate. We normally ask that inexperienced editors use the {{rename}} template to alert us to such issues, but it would be great to get you more involved in Commons (as it would be great to get other editors involved). As I noted here, I have used admin discretion and have given you the filemover right, as I don't believe you'll abuse that tool. :)

By doing this, when you are looking at penis photos on Commons, you will be able to do this on the spot. Just be sure to look at our file renaming policy before helping the community with renames.

Again, I appreciate you bringing that issue to the community's attention, and perhaps we will see more of you on Commons too. Drop us a line if we can be of further assistance. Cheers, Russavia (talk) 20:11, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

Hi again Jimmy, sorry to come back here, I know you are a busy guy, and you would probably rather leave things like this to community to deal with.

But, earlier today I posted this to the thread you started on Commons, in which I suggested we use a colour picker to determine the pantone/HEX/RGB colour of the penis and rename them that in order to avoid having to deal with the "colour" issue. I thought this issue was jokingly raised by another editor, I didn't see that you yourself brought that issue up -- I simply saw the penis-cock issue that you raised, not noticing that you thought "black" might be racist. So sorry if you saw that and thought I was taking the piss out of you; we try to keep a jovial, mellow atmosphere on Commons, and that was just part of that. But as it was a serious concern on your behalf, we should look at it seriously.

Here's the dilemma, I'm not really sure how this could reasonably be addressed. Obviously we want to take your opinion into account, so perhaps you could make a suggestion on how to name such penises? Obviously calling it a Negro penis is out of the question because it is quite an offensive term. Using the word "coloured" might be considered offensive, especially if we were to rename a South African penis that way given the stigma of that term during apartheid. Calling it a black penis might be considered offensive by say Australian Aboriginals considering the history behind its use, although acceptance to its usage is increasing. Looking here on this project, I see Black people states this is an everyday English term for, well, black people, and there isn't really any racist overtone to it's usage (unless it is mean to be by way of its usage).

But I decided to check off this project on a site where I know people upload photos of their penis as part of their profiles, and see how it's done there. When I edit/create my profile on Gaydar, maybe you've heard of it, the options for ethnicity are:

• "Asian" - obviously means say "East Asian" (Chinese/Japanese/Filipino/etc)
• "South Asian" - obviously means from the Indian sub-continent
• "Caucasian" - obviously means what could be called "white people"
• "Hispanic" - obviously means from Latin America
• "Middle Eastern" - obviously means someone from Middle East (usually say Turkish)
• "Arab" - obviously means Arab
• "Mixed Race" - obviously means inter-racial
• "Other" - every thing else
• "Black" - obviously for everything covered in "black people"
• "Rather not say" - in my experience this is an option that is chosen by people who want to either hide their ethnicity for fear of not hooking up, or the odd closet case who wants to keep anyone from knowing that they are, well, queer.

Given that site was founded in South Africa, and they have always used black instead of coloured (or other such terms) I think that "black penis" would be fine. I'm not sure how it is on straight websites, but if it's important, you might want someone else to check that to confirm. But if you still believe that this is an issue that could be construed as racist, the last thing we would want is for the issues I've raised from being publicised; given the recent events on how categorisation on this project is sexist and broken.

I'm sorry that I've come to your talk page with this, I know it might be embarrassing under the circumstances for me to be asking you to discuss penises as openly as I am, but we really need to know about the issues above. If you would prefer to discuss this in private, feel free to contact me, and I'd be happy to discuss this and any other "penis"/"sexuality" related issues that you'd like to get off your chest. I'm all ears. Cheers, Russavia (talk) 17:01, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Ignoring the fact that there is no objective criteria that would allow the cultural heritage of a human penis to be determined from an image...Under what circumstances would the information be useful? What are the anatomical differences between Asian and Hispanic penises? — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 19:38, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Are you arguing that photos of caucasian penises are sufficient and we don't need photos of penises of other races? -mattbuck (Talk) 20:54, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Absolutely not, but the question does raise another issue; How do we label the images in a manner that avoids representing one as the "standard" by which all others are judged? Russavia's suggestion may actually be a good solution to the problem. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 21:40, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

• Btw there is a weird thing over there. When you search 'purpose' you get a very vulgar image at the top of the search. The same happens with 'result' but the image is File:PieCrust masked.jpg. It may be just a glitch but it could be someone playing with the search function as well. The two search words are not found anywhere on the file pages. If someone is playing and gets caught I hope I get to hear about it. Someone may wish to delete the one image before the Streisand effect happens.--Canoe1967 (talk) 10:22, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Did you know that Gregory Kohs and EricBarbour are trolling you and the community does nothing?

Useless discussion of banned users.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:47, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Sweet or salt? Hi again Jimmy, you may wish to look at Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/Incidents#List_of_Wikipedia_controversies.E2.80.8E. You were probably aware that you have been getting trolled by these clowns, but you should know that the general admin corps is too scared to do anything about it. You may remember the Kazakhstan issues, when on Quora you "liked"/"upvoted"/"whatever" my statement which essentially said that the Wikipediocracy crew are trolls, and anyone willing to be associated with the likes of Kohs and Barbour should be ejected from the project. Perhaps you could have a word to admins here on English Wikipedia and direct them (I believe you still have some power here) to block these jokers (Kohs and Barbour) on sight. Permabanned trolls should not be allowed to run riot in this community with impunity. And anyone who disagrees should be shown the door too. Russavia (talk) 20:38, 15 May 2013 (UTC) No true Wikipedian could possibly disagree. Bielle (talk) 21:07, 15 May 2013 (UTC) "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Wikipediocracy forum". AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:22, 15 May 2013 (UTC) I believe I once suggested that as cause for immediate banning on Commons. -mattbuck (Talk) 21:25, 15 May 2013 (UTC) In that case, as an admin on Commons and a moderator there, you should just get on with it and ban me now. Furthermore, if I provide a list of names of accounts on Commons that have accounts on Wikipediocracy, do you promise to ban them, too? I can think of a few folks that need to go - Alison ❤ 21:28, 15 May 2013 (UTC) Well gee Alison. You're a special case because you're A) a member of Wikipediocracy (an admin there even) and B) not a moron, troll, blackguard, or even a pathetically unhappy chronic whiner. That's pretty unusual, and so good for you, but you probably shouldn't throw up your special sui generis status to valorize and run interference for those who are -- that is, most of your Wikipediocracy buddies. Ezra Pound was pretty talented too, but so what. Herostratus (talk) 04:06, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Could an admin remind people that No Personal Attacks applies even on Jimmy's page? Calling people as a group morons, tolls, blackguards and whiners violates the spirit of the NPA rules. Thanks. InconvenientCritic (talk) 07:10, 16 May 2013 (UTC) One of their site admins suggested that I did indeed have an account there. From which you can draw the obvious conclusion as to whether I did or not. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:26, 15 May 2013 (UTC) (redacted}Black Kite (talk) 22:32, 15 May 2013 (UTC) Prioryman, could you please redact your statement? It contains personal attacks, which you know are forbidden on wikipedia. Thanks. InconvenientCritic (talk) 21:40, 15 May 2013 (UTC) WP:NPA is normally read as forbidding personal attacks on active contributors. A loophole. Formerip (talk) 21:49, 15 May 2013 (UTC) The second point of WP:WIAPA ("Using someone's affiliations as an ad hominem means of dismissing or discrediting their views") is clearly violated by that post, and so I have removed it. Black Kite (talk) 22:32, 15 May 2013 (UTC) O.k. I'll volunteer. I've got a Wikipediocracy forum account. Who is going to take me to ANI/ARBCOM/THEDUCKINGSTOOL, and what are the charges? AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:35, 15 May 2013 (UTC) Ducking? The giant ducks are having difficulties apparently. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 21:39, 15 May 2013 (UTC) Sweet please. Albacore (talk) 22:50, 15 May 2013 (UTC) Jimmy, as you can from the above, a simple discussion on Kohs and Barbour manages to go into irrelevant tangents. So that these 2 permabanned trolls don't cause disruption on this project, perhaps you could simply make it clear to all that any edits they make are to be reverted on sight, and for their offending IPs to be blocked. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who know that these two trolls are trolling on this project, and do nothing about it and actually participate in it, so perhaps editors such as myself will just have to revert them on sight. You'll also then find out pretty quickly who is here to contribute and who is here to troll. Cheers, Russavia (talk) 22:51, 15 May 2013 (UTC) Russavia, I suspect Jimbo would put you and Greg Kohs into the same category, given only those two choices. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 23:30, 15 May 2013 (UTC) As an aside...Russavia, I ask kindly that you cease edit-warring over another editor's comments on Jimbo's own talk page. DC's comment above is not IMO any sort of egregious personal attack that necessitates redaction. If you feel otherwise it would be best all-around to get an outside opinion by bringing the matter to WP:ANI. Though I do not know if that would go very well; you're asserting that DC is calling you a troll by allusion, but complaining about that doesn't really look good with your repeated and direct use of "troll" and "trollish", etc...above when describing living people, regardless of their on-wiki status. Tarc (talk) 00:16, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Do note that both Delicious Carbuncle and Tarc are long-time Wikipediocracy members. And, yes, they will do anything to derail a discussion about that site, they always do. SilverserenC 01:35, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Er, I am pretty sure all involved here are well-aware of who is a member of what website by now. Should we add a "Btw, Seren is a member of the Rescue Squad" postscript to every XfD that you participate in? Guilt by association to discredit someone's words isn't very effective or honest in the long run. Tarc (talk) 02:10, 16 May 2013 (UTC) I think it's rather relevant when the person is attempting to defend the group they are associated with. SilverserenC 02:41, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Silver seren, I think people are aware that I have written blog posts on Wikipediocracy, since I have posted about a few of them on this very page. Like this one about how child pornography is dealt with on Commons. Why do you think Commons is talking now about finding better ways to deal with possible child pornography? Why do you think there's a discussion going on here about "speedy deletion" of possible child pornography? As for "derailing" the discussion, I'm not sure there's actually anything here to derail. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 03:58, 16 May 2013 (UTC) I have far less of a problem with the blog posts that actually deal specifically with Wikipedia. I have a bigger problem with the ones that delve into people's personal lives and attempt to smear them because of it. Such things are petty and childish and, sadly, the norm on Wikipediocracy. SilverserenC 04:06, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Why we all so negative about trolls all the time? They just short little hairy dudes (or dudettes! No sexist!) who live under bridges and annoy Spanish girls and their adorable talking monkeys with riddles. No real harm from that. Ya' gotta have love for the people.--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 04:15, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Could one of you who is a member of that other site find out what Eric Barbour claims he has on me? He recently posted an ominous message that had all sorts of McCarthyite overtones about the dossier he claims to have on my on- and off-Wiki sins. I think it will probably make hilarious reading, but not worth actually joining that other site for. --Orange Mike | Talk 02:51, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Joining the site wouldn't give you access anyways. They have their own wiki that you have to be given permission to access. They claim to have dossier's on dozens of Wikipedians. The sad part is that, a fair amount of the time, they make one on someone just because someone holds an opinion they disagree with and has nothing to do with any actual criticism of Wikipedia. SilverserenC 03:19, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Orangemike, if you don't act scared, it makes Russavia's fearmongering look silly. The least you could do is not laugh. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 04:00, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Well yes - if you actually look at what goes on there, it is mostly vacuous whining by people with a grudge about something or other, gossip about people that hardly anyone cares about anyway, and endless petty arguments between people with too much time on their hands. As a venue for serious criticism of Wikipedia, it is an abysmal failure. Not to be taken seriously... AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC) You could have just said "It's like Wikipedia" to cover all that.--The Devil's Advocate tlk. cntrb. 04:48, 16 May 2013 (UTC) Heck, Delicious: I'm the president of a Wisconsin State Employees Union local: I wake up to a daily barrage of lying abuse from a batch of corrupt scum and felonious hirelings every day, plus talk shows on Sunday! There's nothing the Wikipediocracians could hurl at me that could match what my people endure every day. I'm just wondering if they have conflated me with the Will Smith character from Bad Boys. --Orange Mike | Talk 04:52, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

AfD for comprehensiveness of article on controversial subject seems contrary to WP goal

Editors object to an article being comprehensive. Being informative is confused with promotion. An AfD is pending on Success Academy Charter Schools, which are highly controversial in New York City education circles, as is its founder/CEO, a city politician who said she'll likely run again. An admin wants a speedy deletion and some editors want stubification. An AfD on the article about the founder led to keeping after major chopping (I largely restored after talk). Talk is ignored by almost everyone except me. Good faith and civility are disappearing. Please help. Nick Levinson (talk) 17:05, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the proposal for speedy deletion was inappropriate, and that AfD process that is now in progress is the correct approach. However, both the length of the article and the length of its principal proponent's comments in AfD are too long. The principal proponent's comment in AfD appear to be a filibuster. Robert McClenon (talk) 17:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Not a filibuster: Everything was on point and when charges are made we need to respond in anticipation that it will be credited. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I doubt it will be deleted. I think the main issue is that "the sum of all knowledge" has turned to "the sum of all knowledge we can easily source on the internet". I have seen similar articles that start very large and get shaved down to one sentence/one source. It has 250,000 bytes now with 472 individual references. I can see why it can be so large being a 'different' school in NYC. It will have lots of comprehensive content that is well sourced because of that. The main problem may be that many editors will compare the article size to there own schools. Your school may be smaller but at the same time may rate a larger article. The article may be doomed for a huge butchering not for the sake of the project but because it just seems too large for an article on a school. Welcome to Wikipedia.--Canoe1967 (talk) 17:33, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Plausible, the comparison to other schools. I also used offline books and not all knowledge, but I see your point. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Article size does not seem to be a clear indicator of importance or significance. See Bradfield College (I'm sure there are much better examples). --Demiurge1000 (talk) 22:09, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

It looks a certainty from the AfD that the Success Academy Charter Schools article isn't going to be deleted. Instead, it will be reduced to a stub, and then rewritten as a proper encyclopaedic article, rather than the grossly-bloated collection of everything under the sun that it is now. There is nothing whatsoever in Wikipedia's 'goals' which justifies such a lengthy, rambling and trivia-filled rag-bag article, and it does a disservice to anyone actually interested in the subject to have to read through such endless waffle. AndyTheGrump (talk) 22:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

You are, of course, completely misrepresenting why DGG took the article to AFD. Not because it is "comprehensive", but because several editors find its tone to be promotional, and because it is evidently being used as a WP:COATRACK. I skimmed through parts of the article, because it is nearly impossible to read as a whole, and found pointless trivia, a paragraph dedicated to pointing out people associated with these schools have Wikipedia articles, micro stub sections that have no point - "Governor" being one, "Congress" isn't much better. But perhaps most notably, the CEO, Eva Moskowitz, is mentioned one hundred and thirty one times. Many of those are preceded by "according to". That lends me to worry about POV, primary sources, and several other aspects of our alphabet soup of policies. Any concerns brought up seem to have been met with tl;dr responses that could quite accurately be described as filibustering. Truthfully, having now been alerted to this article, I find myself agreeing with those who want to torch it and start over. Resolute 22:35, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

No misrepresentation occurred. The nomination was not based on what subsequent editors at the AfD said, since they came after the nomination, unless they were in prior communication not at the article's talk page or AfD. If the article's tone is promotional, then surely someone can pick one sentence and write the same content with a nonpromotional tone; that hasn't been attempted with present content and that's why I don't think tone is the issue, but I appreciate your thought that it is. TLDR doesn't apply to answering charges with reasonable concision, as I did, because otherwise only charges and not disagreeing responses should be considered, producing bizarre results at best. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

@Nick Levinson. I added the commons media category to the article in external links. There is only one picture of your schools that I could find there. You could have some fun with students and faculty to take good school images and upload them. Have contests to get the best ones etc. You could also reward students by letting them choose images and add them to the article. The lucky ones get to choose the 'image of the day' type thing and change it in the article. I don't think this violates policy. They are also very welcome to take pictures for other articles as well. You will probably run into problems changing out the ones that have good pictures. Category:Wikipedia requested images has a whole bunch of articles that they can look through. I may actually create Category:Articles with lame images if it doesn't exist yet.--Canoe1967 (talk) 04:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm not with the schools. If anyone wants to ask the schools they can, but school-submitted work would almost certainly be subject to COI and school-prepared work would need attribution in a caption as a primary source. The article briefly had an indoors photo with children combined with a logo such that each was about half the image; and somewhere in Wikimedia I raised a question about whether it was allowed because it was posted either as being in the public domain or under the standard Wikipedia licensing (I forgot which) but not under fair use, and I doubted the logo would have been released under the first two ways; another editor looked for but did not find a release on the schools' website and the image was shortly tagged and deleted from Wikimedia. I think I looked in Google long ago for free images but didn't find any. An image with children would also raise an issue about their rights of publicity that likely bars use of such images here. Since their schools are co-located, it may be that there wouldn't be many acceptable images that would be very different from the present one (I imagine that many of their schools have their logos on the outsides of buildings, often dull buildings, but that most other scenes or more interesting scenes would probably not qualify, but I have never been to any of their schools despite my relative proximity). However, relative to the article's eventual length, a few images would help; I just don't have anything more to offer. Nick Levinson (talk) 16:30, 17 May 2013 (UTC) (Corrected two misspellings: 16:38, 17 May 2013 (UTC))

Subjects are always allowed and encouraged to provide images for articles about them. I spam them with email almost daily. They get the same !vote as anyone else for inclusion though. Our aim it to have the best images available for inclusion. If they provide better than what we have then we are are pretty well forced to use them because consensus shouldn't decide on including images of lower quality. They would need to be a 'free licence' with 'consent' of indentifiable people when not taken in a place with public access and no expectation of privacy. I created File:Visual consent image.jpg that I hope commons will tweak and accept as an easier form of consent than the backlogged OTRS for images taken in private places. We would just need to do a 'stacked' upload like File:Pamela Reed 1977.JPG which has other versions of the same file to prove public domain through lack of copyright. I should actually write a wp:essay about image issues. Uploading, consent, licencing, copyright, public domain, and inclusion !votes, etc. We discovered a treasure recently with File:Nighthawks by Edward Hopper 1942.jpg that has been in the public domain since 1969ish and very few knew this or why. The place that owns it may be very choked when others clue in. They still licence it for big bucks to publish. They also sell prints, bags, and umbrellas of it, I think. If you, the schools, or any others would like to contact me for help with images for any articles then feel free to do so. The easiest way would be to create accounts at commons, read the 'images nutshell' that I hope to write, and just start uploading. Images can take a long time to delete once uploaded so that gives us time to sort out any upload boo-boos they may make. They can also create Flickr accounts for free. We can transfer from there as long as they don't use the NC or ND limits which we don't allow on commons. CC-by or CC-by-sa are the most common. I avoid the SA limit with my images because it may make it harder to combine and re-use my images.--Canoe1967 (talk) 17:45, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thank you! That is all.. Dohertyben (talk) 22:47, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Child protection

Jimmy, we need clarity that the Wikipedia:Child Protection policy applies to the uploading or inclusion of sexually explicit photos or videos of minors on Wikipedia. Current written policy does not address whether users can upload (or include from Commons) sexually explicit images without any evidence that the subjects are of legal age. In my opinion, such images are a way to facilitate inappropriate adult-child relationships, but it would be easier to clean up this place if the rule was made very clear. Can you have legal staff review this? Can you apply some force of logic to the argument in the interrim? Most of our sexuality articles use drawings or paintings that don't raise any issue, or else they have medical type photos that may be nude or graphic, but are not sexually explicit. I don't think the encyclopedia would be harmed at all by raising standards in this regard. Jehochman ^Talk 23:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

I agree with you completely, but wonder - is this an actual problem? (I'm talking here about English Wikipedia primarily, the conversation about Commons is of course a different one to some extent.)--Jimbo Wales (talk) 07:45, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Unfortunately it is a problem here on Wikipedia. Some of the sexually explicit images on Commons are being migrated into Wikipedia articles. For example you could review the conversation I'm having at Talk:Fingering (sexual_act)#Legal issue regarding my edit [8]. The article ejaculation has images of somebody's penis, and we have no idea how old that person is. Could it be one of our 15 year old editors? (The uploader's user page on commons has a solicitation. [9])The burden should be on those uploading or using sexually explicit images or videos of people to provide evidence of the age (not the burden on the editor removing an image to prove the subject is under age). While I understand that Wikimedia doesn't want to admit responsibility for section 2257 compliance, it is certainly possible to establish a policy requiring age verification based on a moral obligation to protect minors from being exploited. Just add a line to Wikipedia:Child Protection that says something like, "to protect minors from exploitation, all sexually explicit images in Wikipedia must have evidence that the subject(s) are at least 18 years old". This would also have the benefit of cleaning up Commons if the policy were extended there. People keep asking why Wikipedia is such a hostile place for female editors; the excessive and irresponsible uploading of porn is part of it. Jehochman ^Talk 11:09, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Have you tried that approach you suggest and then see how it flies beginning on the talk page of the policy, perhaps an RfC, etc.? It could be relatively easy to change that, ... and then you go to the harder row of enforcement (note you are likely to get questions about the meaning of explicit, and whether that is just left to consensus or not). Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:19, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

"Sexually explicit" has a legal definition 18 USC 2256 which we can import, and while there may be some edge cases requiring discussion, a policy would let us clean up the easy cases quickly. I've tried initiating discussions at Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#New criteria 2 and Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#New criteria, but ran into objections, most notably that Wikipedia:Child protection already covered age requirements. Unfortunately, when I try to use Wikipedia:Child protection as justification to remove problematic images, editors then say, "The policy doesn't say that". The policy need to be made clear on the issue of age verification. Jehochman ^Talk 11:32, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

OK. So, shouldn't you address it at Child Protect laying it out in a well sourced and un-provocative fashion (eg here are the issues, here is what should be considered, here is a proposal)? Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:44, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I was under the impressions that WP:CHILDPROTECT had substantial input WMF, and was not entirely derived from the community. My request is for Jimmy to bring this matter to WMF legal's attention so they can draft a suitable addition to the policy that does not complicate WMF's legal obligations. This is the place where our policies intersect with the law, and we need the lawyers to check it carefully. Jehochman ^Talk 11:49, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I know that Geoff is very busy and also the WMF is understandably eager that policies be developed with strong community consensus and strong legal foundation as twin pillars of a wise and ethical approach to these and related matters. Therefore, I propose that we follow Alanscottwalker's suggestion and hash out some exact wording that we in the community would like to see, and then run it past WMF legal to make sure it meets their approval as well. (Although note well: it is extremely unlikely that a policy like this could cause problems for the WMF - NOT having a policy like this seems much more likely to cause problems, but IANAL.) As with many such things, my personal view is that going too quickly to "legal reasoning" tends to take the conversation down a bad path, as people start to think that the point is mere compliance with the law. Of course we do want to comply with the law, but we ALSO want to adhere to the highest ethical standards, which should generally far exceed legal minimums.--Jimbo Wales (talk) 12:10, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Link: Wikipedia_talk:Child_protection#Images. Jehochman ^Talk 13:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

This isn't up to the community. I've already seen what loose reasoning legal has applied regarding the display of the Virgin Killer album "art". I recognize we're not in a position of liability hosting that image, but it kind of, let's say, set the standard that others feel can occasionally be breached, if for no other reasons than to test the boundaries. We're either in compliance with the laws or we aren't, and that sort of thing isn't up to community debate. What your suggesting is just going to be a big dramafest, when what's needed is simply an implementation of law and reminders that anyone that isn't willing to be in compliance can go find a new playground. I'm already thinking that there may be a half dozen contributors at Commons that need to be given a free pass to troll elsewhere...I'm not paying for them to have free storage space for unused, unencyclopedic "art" that doesn't even have any proof that the subject in the image is of legal age.--MONGO 13:35, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Jehochman, I am pleased to see that these concerns are finally getting some serious attention. As you probably know, I have been trying to draw attention related issues on Commons for some time. Let's take a closer look at your example from Fingering (sexual_act) - File:Fingering close-up.jpg. This file was uploaded to Commons from Flickr by Commons admin TwoWings, one of several Commons admins who have worked diligently to increase the percentage of sexual content on Commons. (Note that Flickr, unlike Commons, would not have shown this image to users who did not wish to see sexually explicit material and would have provided a way, unlike Commons, to report the image if it had not been properly categorized as sexually explicit.) The Flickr account is now closed (which is often a sign that the images have been scraped from elsewhere). This image is actually part of a larger set of images, posted elsewhere on the internet before it was uploaded to Flickr or Commons. I think it is unlikely that a lower resolution copy was posted on Flickr by the creator (in this case, the subject herself). We have no way of knowing if the subject of this set of images consented to it being distributed, or if this is "revenge porn". In cases like this, consent is more of a concern to me than the possibility that the subject was underage (although that is a reasonable concern). Delicious carbuncle (talk) 13:47, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I've already nominated the image for deletion for those reasons, actually. --Conti|✉ 14:23, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Note that Flickr, unlike Commons, would not have shown this image to users ... Also flickr has on every page a link to a page where anyone can report an image to trained flickr staff. One of the options on that page "Other concerns" is monitored 24/7 the underage stuff gets deleted within hours of reporting. Flickr staff are also in direct contact with law enforcement, and as said above have the training to deal with these types of issues. John lilburne (talk) 15:01, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

You're surely not suggesting we just do it properly are you? I'm sure that must already have been considered, and there are good reasons we can't. Begoon ^talk 15:32, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

While we must stick to the law, we must also consider that the relevant laws are motivated by particular moral values which don't always have a direct relation to "child protection". Sometimes in the US, children are actually jailed for uploading pictures of themselves because they violate child porn laws by doing so. There can thus be a tension between sticking to the law and actually protecting children. Count Iblis (talk) 15:45, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Despite that tension, we must, as you say, stick to the law. If that leads to children being jailed for posting explicit images of themselves here, that is a terrible result but not one that is of our making. Delicious carbuncle (talk) 16:17, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure you're probably right, CI, and I've heard that said before, but [10] gives me nothing (probably crap Goole-fu on my part), so if you can, would be nice - not doubting you at all, but I'd like to be appalled at a real case rather than an implication. DC is basically right, though, as you are. Begoon ^talk 16:25, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I understand some people who think children should not be prosecuted for downloading, posting, or texting explicit pictures of themselves to others under their own free will, but as DC stated- it's against the law. To me, at least, I see no connection to a conspiracty theory about the moral police that the children are being "jailed" (and I assume it would be juvinile detention at worse, not jail, most likely a PINS petition, Boys or Girlstown, or some sort of probation, and/or suspension from school). It is not a moral issue, it is a legal issue- it is illegal. Children KNOW it is illegal, if an adult were to ask for the same pictures they would know to report it. Because they are sending them of their own free will does not absolve them in the eyes of the law (only NAMBLA I assume would defend their right to do so). Frankly I dont care about children's "rights"; I care about what the black and white letter of the law states; if a child gets arrested for breaking the law, well they broke they law. We shouldnt craft our policies based on morals (or being against a certain religious groups morals) or feeling sorry for children, we should base them on the law.97.88.87.68 (talk) 20:04, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

There are the US laws to content with but we also need to take into account this whole issue of child protection in general which paradoxically includes the possibility of persecution for precisely uploading illegal pictures. This means that while we should remove illegal pictures, the child protection policy should focus on all aspects of this issue, which includes not just the danger posed by pedophiles, but also the fact that many countries have repressive laws, that children can be bullied by other children etc. etc. If we only take the law into account, we would not do a good job of preventing problems. Count Iblis (talk) 20:31, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Ok, CI. Give me the citation I asked for above for "Sometimes in the US, children are actually jailed for uploading pictures of themselves because they violate child porn laws by doing so." That's not a challenge - it's an illustration of how these conversations need to be held. If you can provide one, then the comment is worthy of further discussion - if not, well, we need to move past it for now, because otherwise anyone has a license to derail any discussion by throwing in any old guff. It may not be guff, as I said, I've heard it said before, but if you're serious about this, then those are the rules we need to play by. Otherwise it's a pointless opinion shop. Until there can be a proper, evidence based discussion, what both you or I say is worthless. I don't need to cite the law for you, I think, you know it. You're implying it should not be the be all and end all, so pony up - concrete examples of any child jailed by not being allowed to upload child porn, or by being reported to law enforcement for doing so. Then we have an issue to discuss. Dead end otherwise. Once we have the example you can explain how/whether it could have been prevented by a different approach, or we can discuss it. Sorry if that sounds uncharitable, but vague handwaving won't move us forward. Begoon ^talk 21:37, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Count Iblis, we are not in a position to know if the uploader of child pornography is an adult or the child themselves - lacking that information, I see no other option than removing it from public view and alerting the appropriate authorities in each and every case. Do you have another option? Delicious carbuncle (talk) 21:44, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

How about not letting the image reach public view in the first place? Hillbillyholiday ^talk 21:58, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

• Child protection policy should also include some regulations to prevent bullying of children on the sites that belong to the Wikimedia Foundation because bullying is a big problem here. As it stands now the Foundation does absolutely nothing to stop bullying, and the Arbitration Committee protects bullies with the administrative tools instead of protecting children. 76.126.142.59 (talk) 16:35, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
• The dais, the ditch, and the roads: We may wish to start with three levels of arguments. The ditch being the lowest standard which includes interpretation or bending the road which is the laws. The dias we could peg somewhere between the top of the beanstalk and The Vatican. Once we create these three sections of the discussions then we populate them with their common arguments. The best outcome would be a second, and much higher road, that would be our accepted standards.--Canoe1967 (talk) 18:17, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  • What?--MONGO 20:47, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Basically most of us know the points that will be brought up by all factions. It may be easiest to list them at the start and then hack away at them from there until consensus is reached on higher or lower accepted standards for en:wp and commons. I see no reason why we can't have a 'not allowed on en:wp' category at commons.--Canoe1967 (talk) 22:09, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:Child protection

This issue is being discussed at Wikipedia talk:Child protection. Why don't we take this discussion there to avoid duplication? Robert McClenon (talk) 20:39, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Nonsense the last post there was 3.5 years ago. The discussion is here not there. John lilburne (talk) 20:54, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

That's a weird redirect due to case sensitivity. I have corrected it. There is discussion now that I have corrected the old weird redirect. Robert McClenon (talk) 20:57, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

Actually it was the space after the colon that prompted the redirect. I've corrected the link and further directed the target but I have to say that I don't see the issue you raised as being equivalent to the discussion above. I'm not entirely convinced that it has merit as this is not a matter that a parent can overcome through permission. My76Strat (talk) 21:08, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

My question about parental consent was not related to the suggestion to go to the proper Wikipedia Talk page rather than using a user talk page to discuss procedural updates. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:11, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I've redirected to the entire page, not to the paragraph. Robert McClenon (talk) 21:12, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

My bad. My76Strat (talk) 21:20, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

A cookie for you!

I saw you in a video I watched in U.S History class about the North VS the South in the mid 1800's. Good job, Jim. I <3 Wikipedia. Good luck with the foundation un upcoming years. Sincerely, WorldTraveller101(Trouble?/My Work) 21:15, 17 May 2013 (UTC)