Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-09-25/In the media

In the media

Fox News: Wikipedia abandons efforts to purge porn from online encyclopedia

Fox News writer Perry Chiaramonte published an article detailing Wikipedia's alleged abandonment of its fight to remove pornography. The article features comments from Wikipediocracy co-founders and banned Wikipedians Gregory Kohs and Eric Barbour; the latter asserted that most Wikipedia administrators are "young males who don’t write any content ... and love to fight among themselves", adding that to them, Wikipedia is "a giant video game, not an 'encyclopedia'". They also noted that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia user page) deleted hundreds of images several years ago, only to have them undeleted and re-added. Fox News noted that the Wikimedia Foundation board did begin to try to solve the problem, but efforts were dropped after a consensus was not reached.

“

Wales did indeed remove images from the site and made a call for the foundation to implement a "personal image filter"; in May 2011, the Board of Trustees unanimously voted 10-0 in favor of the filter. But protests against the decision led the board to reverse its decision. The board ultimately canceled any plans for an image filter, leaving pornography freely available to all site visitors.

”

Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh conceded that the board currently is not taking any steps to remove pornographic images, saying "This was a major discussion within our community. Thousands [about 24,000] of users contributed to the process. Ultimately, our board declared that the results of this referendum were inconclusive, and that no single system would be effective, nor was there consensus about the need for the system."

The article concludes with Walsh noting that Wikimedia Commons sees hundreds of images added and deleted on a minute-by-minute basis, and that inappropriate images—be they copyright violations or potentially illegal—are removed by volunteers quickly, sometimes instantaneously, calling it part of the “normal, daily process on our project."

In brief

South Africans launch effort to expand Wikipedia coverage : Concerned with missing or inaccurate information about its country, Lead SA has gathered a diverse group of contributors in hopes of improving the coverage of South Africa. The Daily Maverick lamented the poor coverage of South Africa-related topics like monkey gland sauce and berg wind. On a more serious note, several sources pointed out the fact that the English language Wikipedia is dominated by North American and European viewpoints. Business Day interviewed two people who stated that this bias hurts the coverage of South Africa and tends to portray the nation, and even the African continent, in a negative light.
Plastic surgery advocated through Wikipedia: The Daily Dot highlighted accusations against plastic surgeons who use Wikipedia and associated projects to advertise for their services.
Wikipedia article competition: The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) announced its 2013 competition to improve the quality of existing Wikipedia articles related to computational biology. Full details can be found at the related Wikipedia page.

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25 September 2013 (all comments)

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Some indication that the article confuses Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons would be welcome. Wikipedia hosts very few if any pornographic images, and the deletion of images by Jimmy Wales was on Commons (where the rapidly undeleted images were mainly images of artworks by long-established artists like Félicien Rops, which didn't enamour people to the porn deletion cause at all). Fram (talk) 08:00, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Fox News? Wikipediocracy? We must be hard up (no pun intended) for news nowadays. Int21h (talk) 08:10, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That is a good point, Fram and one I did consider : here was my thinking in not mentioning it: the title of the Fox article is misleading, but in all honesty, I highly doubt they know (or care) the difference, but as that wasn't the primary slant of the article, I didn't really find it necessary to point that out, as, in the scheme of things and in the context of the article, it is not really a central point to their argument. And In21h, yeah, bit of a slow news week . Thanks to you both for your feedback. Go Phightins! 10:32, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Yes Commons has stopped attempting to delete any porn and is instead now trying to delete all diagnostic images [1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:23, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That's a needlessly inflammatory representation of your opponents in a very complicated legal debate, James. You should know better. Powers ^T 13:35, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

And this I bet is how the mainstream media will paint the issue if Commons moves forwards with deletion. Yes it is a complicated issue. Not having "diagnostic images" because they are complicated however does not seem like the right choice IMO. We however have a community on Commons who is willing to fight tooth and nail to keep "porn" of questionable educational value. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) (if I write on your page reply on mine) 16:23, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Where's the pornographic content? Beside the pages obviously about the topic, and of human sexuality, these types of things never pop up randomly on Wikipedia. Epicgenius^{(give him tirade • check out damage)} 00:09, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

That is not true. I don't appreciate having to see that when I check my watchlist. It doesn't happen often but it can. - Shiftchange (talk) 12:12, 5 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

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