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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Or, the porn partisans can create a porn-friendly fork, and leave the original alone.

The question is, is the encyclopedic value of graphic sexual imagery worth the cost, which is reduced accessibility of the whole project. Wales' answer, which I agree with, is "no".

At the heart of every debate about Wikipedia policy, I see the same notion: that because Wikipedia is on the Internet, and because it's open to everyone to edit, and because it's powered mostly by editors unaffiliated with the project, it "belongs" to everyone. But it doesn't. It's not a democracy! It has an agenda: building the world's greatest encyclopedia. It's rational and consistent for the project to trade openness for accessibility and quality.

There's a whole rest of the Internet for the stuff that doesn't make the project's cut.

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Why cut just the porn, though? It's not even the most offensive. I'd say gore is the most universally offensive thing on Wikipedia, and there are some pretty gory articles about medical conditions. So much so that I sometimes disable images before reading some of those sections of the encyclopedia. And there have been perennial debates about whether Wikipedia is limiting its educational reach into the Muslim world by unnecessarily including Mohammed images (and there are similar examples of Wikipedia's inclusion of blasphemous or otherwise offensive content from the perspective of other cultures).

My view would be that it makes more sense to produce all the content in one place, as one large project that's all-inclusive and has no offensiveness standards, and then repackage subsets (no-nudity, no-blasphemy, no-Tiananmen, etc.) if doing so would aid distribution of the result, or maybe subsets for other reasons too. I.e. the primary focus of Wikipedia as a project should be producing the encyclopedia, not distributing it--- the great thing about open content is that anyone can distribute it in any form they want. It'd be great if there were third parties dedicated entirely to distributing nicely repackaged and curated versions of it, including, say, a version that school libraries would feel comfortable installing on their machines.

Gore: I agree! Some pictures of gore remove more value than they add.

Educational reach into the Muslim world: I don't care.

Your suggestion about an encyclopedia project that produces content to build other encyclopedias with --- a meta-encyclopedia? --- is sensible. You should start that project. I don't think it's Wikipedia.

Well, Wikipedia was intended to be that project from the start (I've been involved with it since 2003, and that was clearly the intent at the time). A lot of people have started using wikipedia.org as their primary encyclopedia, but I think that's just because nobody's built anything else out of it, so your only choice currently is to read the online snapshot of raw meta-encyclopedia, complete with obvious "work-in-progress" banners everywhere.

Admittedly, it's unclear where it currently lies. Since wikipedia.org's gotten so many viewers, there's a significant number of Wikipedians, and probably the majority of the official folks at the Foundation, who think a reader-centric encyclopedia ought to be a priority. I personally think readers should be secondary, and producing raw content should be Wikipedia's main mission, with some other organization (not Wikipedia or owned by Wikimedia) taking on a reader-centric project of forging that raw content into nicely curated final products. I'd guess most of the old-school (pre-2007 or so) Wikipedians think similarly, but it's quite possible we'll lose out. A bit on a related conflict here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Conflicting_Wikipedia_philoso...

And sure, you might not care about educational outreach into the Muslim world. But other people don't care about educational outreach to kids or adults who're offended by nudity (I personally don't care much more about nudity than I care about Mohammed images, though I dislike gore and spider photos). People generally have lots of opinions on which kinds of cultural norms are more important to respect.

I only have one point to make in this discussion, which is: Wikipedia doesn't have to host content for the sake of hosting content. It can make tradeoffs to achieve its mission, which is to build the best possible encyclopedia. It is reasonable to talk about cost/benefit for things like graphic sexual images.

That's all I've got here.

Maybe it's worth it to host graphic sexual images. I doubt it, but we'll see where the consensus develops.

Arguably the Mohammed images are the most important part of educational outreach for Muslims though. Un-learning the religion into which you were born is probably more important than learning any given fact, since until you unlearn your religion you obviously have no idea how facts are attained and how they should be evaluated.

One can learn how non-religion-related facts are attained and evaluated, while compartmentalizing this so it doesn't affect religious ideas. It's awkward, and I couldn't pull it off for long, but lots of religious scientists presumably manage it.

Agree with your take on gore versus porn. I've looked at 4chan a few times, for example, and I didn't mind the "occasional" porn/sex/nudity pic but what was repulsive was the "ambush gore" pics you'd stumble across. That stuff can literally make you nauseous, give you nightmares, etc. I can't relate to what I see as the puritanical subset/movement in America, the one that protests pictures of naked boobies, sex talk, consenting sexual activities, pictures of reproductive organs but they don't complain about violence, gore, our military in Iraq & Afghanistan killing (even when accidentally) civilians & children, etc. The message I get from them is, "Sex bad -- but violence is good or at least we are apathetic about it if the victims are not American." Seems mentally sick to me, actually.

I'd say gore is the most universally offensive thing on Wikipedia

On some level I agree with you. Sure, he's an environmental hypocrite, but banning Al from Wikipedia is taking it a bit too far.

Down voted, huh? I guess I need to add one of those little eye-winkie things ;) for the sarcastically impaired. :D

There's a whole rest of the Internet for the stuff that doesn't make the project's cut.

Excellent point. What distinguishes Wikipedia from any random webpage is Wikipedia's brand. As a reader of webpages, I find that the Wikipedia domain has heuristic value in helping me decide how useful the webpage will be for my research--and, yes, the research my children do at home when I'm not looking over their shoulders.

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