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farmercuerden (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} farmercuerden) wrote in ![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/community.gif){kind=small} fandom_wank,@ 2010-05-07 21:18:00 |
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| Current mood: | Indignant |
| Entry tags: | art, mod wank, wikipedia |
Jimbo Wales: Let's purge the porn from Wikipedia! Art and diagrams are porn too!
Right. This is a bit complex, and I should point out that I'm a bit involved with some of the wanking near the end, but I think this is too big to miss out here.
It began in early April, when Larry Sanger, arguably co-founder of Wikipedia, announces that he Reported Wikipedia to the FBI, alleging some of the hosted images violated the law.
There was brief discussion of this, but not much happened until this week, when Jimbo Wales decided to make it policy to purge some content from Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia's image host. Jimbo Wales isn't actually in charge of Wikipedia anymore, but he states that the Foundation will be issuing a statement shortly. It includes the wonderfully double-think line,
Although there is a common saying that "Wikimedia Commons is not censored," this statement should not be interpreted to imply that we do not make editorial judgments about the appropriateness of content. We do, all the time, and we must.
And continues to him saying that "explicit sexual content and other imagery without serious merit [must be] deleted."
Admins are concerned about this, and begin editing the proposal, trying to make it into a workable policy. Eventually, it's edited into a policy with fairly widespread support, which excludes non-photographic works, allows works of historical, artistic, or other merit, and so on.
...And that's when Jimbo begins deleting 19th century artworks, diagrams and sketches meant to explain sexual acts, and so on. When Wikipedia has a bot which automatically removes all uses of a file when it's deleted, making it extremely hard to put files back.
And all hell breaks loose.
Finally, the Foundation issues the statement Jimbo said was forthcoming:
The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the
projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to
some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural
sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the
sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is
illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the
grounds that it may offend.
Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational
in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has
no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend
to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that
already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially
offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or
informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no
such value.
...And after that statement, going directly against all Jimbo's claims, his actions begin to look even worse.
Total damage:
11 admins left the project.
Jimbo Wales took a big hit in reputation.
Jimbo took it upon himself to announce his intent to FoxNews, and Slashdot without telling anyone on the project about this, damaging Wikipedia's reputation as it now looks like nothing he said is going to happen as he did.
Calls for Jimbo to lose all deletion rights
And Muslim users are left wondering why images offensive to them, as they depict the prophet Muhammad, are defended, but not images Jimbo merely dislikes.
ETA 1: The rebellion has begun: Most of the undeletion requests from here down are things Jimbo deleted himself.
ETA 2: More wank in the last two threads here (at present, no doubt will increase.)
ETA 3: And, of course, as you do when someone in a position of power has become a huge troll, there's a petition!
ETA 4: Hoo... boy.
ETA 5: Jimbo evidently did this because Fox News was threatening his money supply, by trying to manufacture a scandal, and contacting Wikipedia donors about it. Isn't being paid to edit a bannable offense on Wikipedia? Not that Wales doesn't know a few things about taking money away from Wikipedia. And that link doesn't even include the attempt to get donors to Wikipedia to pay for a trip to a Russian massage parlour. UPDATE: Better, even wankier link about what's going on with Fox News!
ETA 6: My favourite of the new smackdowns.
(Just to note, everything on Wikipedia is archived (unless the founder decides to mess everything up - and even then it's usually visible by admins. That's the very definition of a Wiki. As such, I've been linking to a mixture of live threads and snapshots of points in time. I'll try to switch over to snapshots as threads close.
ETA 7: Hoo, boy, this has blown up so badly overnight. Widespread calls for Jimbo to lose all powers but that of a figurehead, him publicly revealing that he lied to the community about the reasons for his actions, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Going to give this a couple days, then make a new post updating.
