You know where else kids can see pornographic images? Nearly everywhere else on the open Internet. Like this article mentions near the end, children can easily see whatever they please with a Google Image search.
So should we pour money and time into protecting young eyes? Wikimedia probably agrees with me when I think that this goal is probably impossible and thus a waste of resources.
If parents can't accept that their kids will see a lot of different things online, then they should monitor their children's online activity themselves. Shouldn't parents be the ones who do the parenting?
And last, kids are curious. What is the worst that could happen to curious children viewing porn on the Internet? I think the author of the post has a strong cultural bias against depoctions of sexuality. Wikipedia also contains many graphic depictions of violence. Isn't this much, much worse than pornography?
Apart from the fact that the violence is far, far worse than pornography, I totally disagree.
But first: my credentials. I'm a father of two, and I've recently been visiting a number of schools seaching for a primary school for my eldest. My brother is a network admin, at a primary school. Part of his responsibility is administering the internet filters.
Frankly, children don't get to be on the open internet. Every school has a filter. At home, I've turned on safe search, locked down youtubes default settings, etc. Can children get around it? Absolutly! Part of my brothers job is to search through the network shares each month and remove the porn.
However, blocking 100% of the 'bad stuff' is not what this is about. Nobody is still stupid enough to belive that you can install some technological measure, that will stop everything. Espically, if somebody sets out to explicitly circiumvent it.
What this is all about is reducing the chance of in-advertant viewing. Kids like to explore. They will click on link, after link, after link. I'm carefull not to leave knives or sharp objects lying around my kids play area. Online, I would appreciate it if wikipeida took the same care. Your never going to stop stop somebody who is determined enough, but you can at least make a minimal ammount of effort to stop people randomly blundering into this stuff. Having the option to enable a warning before adult images on wikipedia would be helpful. At least I can teach my son that if he sees the warning and clicks 'continue', he will probably see something unpleasent.
As for the suggestion that parents "should monitor their children's online activity themselves" - the internet is no longer the PC sitting in the living room, where you can sit down for a family browsing session! Its phones, tablets and TV's. Its at home, friends houses, its at school and in shops. In 2012, "monitoring my childrens online activity" is already difficult. By 2017 is going to be impossible.
You must be too old to have had the internet as a child/teen to be this naive. Besides, no where do you justify the crusade to keep your children from seeing naked parts of peoples' bodies. It's taboo because you make it. If your child stumbles upon something, congratulations, they're a "netizen". Education is more important than censorship and shielding.
You must have misunderstood my comment - I don't think anywhere I mentioned that I was trying to stop my children from seeing naked parts of people's bodies.
I did however say right up the top that the violence was far far worse. My son does not appreciate stumbling upon the various gory things out there. He has told me so himself. Anything Wikipedia can do to reduce the chance of this happening, would be appreciated.
If I can decompose your response, your position seems to be that since I have not drawn a clear line between what I consider suitable and un-suitable, then my argument is invalid?
Or are you are saying that since there will inevitably be things children find unpleasnet (spiders), trying to protect them from ANY unpleasnt things is a futile exercise?
The latter. Wanting to protect your children does not excuse censorship. I mean, this is literally the rhetoric used by SOPA, PIPA, whatever the newer one is that I don't remember because there are too many damn acronyms. It's all "protect the innocent children".
If you want to hide the image behind a thumbnail or a black/white outlide and require an explicit click, fine. But I can't entertain this sort of discussion without a high level of discomfort.
"If you want to hide the image behind a thumbnail or a black/white outlide and require an explicit click, fine."
Fortunately, that is exactly what is being proposed [1]
I belive SOPA, PIPA, et al, were more about online piracy. However here in Austraila we reciently had to fight againt a proposal for manditory internet censorship, who's reason for being was precicly: "Think of the children!". But just because trying to protect children has been used as a cloak for some pretty unpalatable things does not mean that everything done in the name of protecting children is automatically bad. For example child labour laws were done with the express goal of protecting children and you would be hard pressed to find somebody that would argue they are a bad thing.
Instead we need to think about what is being proposed and evaluate each case it on its merits. Having a knee jerk reaction against filtering is almost as bad as having a knee jerk reaction against porn.
In this case:
* The filter is opt in, not opt out.
* No images would be permantly removed, only hidden
* The feature should be visible, clear and useable. Its not going to silently hide things.
* The principle of least astonishment for the reader would be applied.
I belive that this presents a quite acceptable trade off, between making all information avable to everybody and as you put it - censorship. The tool is there for anybody who wants to use it, and if you don't it has no impact on you.
Neither, I asked a question which you didn't answer and instead decided to respond with ad hominem. Ad hominem is the sign of a lost argument, so either answer the question or remain a loser in this debate.
I'm not having this discussion with you. Having principles and exerting your own beliefs of morality as censorship on the masses are not the same thing and you're a jackass for acting like it is and then spending half of your post trying to use debate rhetoric to "win". That was just embarrassing.
I was going to write basically this comment but had trouble expressing it coherently. However, I think there should be an (optional) filter on search results to prevent mature results being returned accidentally. There's no point trying to stop kids seeking out this kind of content if that's what they're looking for (a losing battle if ever I heard one), but like the example given in the article - a search for 'Human Male' shouldn't give results any more inappropriate than you'd find in a physical encyclopedia.
Wikipedia has no trouble finding people who want to contribute and there are obviously plenty of eyes on the porn. Coding up a "yeah, this is porn" button doesn't seem like an enormously unthinkable amount of effort, and I have trouble imagining it would be difficult to get users to click it.
It isn't a question of whether you agree with the law. It's a question if whether non-compliance with the law is worth the cost. The benefit of having arbitrary, untagged porn on Wikipedia is what exactly? But the cost may be having Wikipedia shut down or fined into oblivion for non-compliance. Is the world a better place with a Wikipedia with the porn tagged and optionally filtered, or with a Wikipedia-shaped hole and for-pay Britannica and Encarta sites fighting over the domain? It's quite possible that those are the real choices, and a Wikipedia as we know it today simply isn't on the menu.
He doesn't disagree with you, one of his main points was that Wikipedia hosts very very disgusting porn. The fact that children can find porn if they seek it out does not mean we should be presenting it to them on a very public website like Wikipedia. Should it suddenly be ok to post nsfl images everywhere in society because anybody can find it if they really want to? Because I feel like Wikipedia doing this is a step in that direction
What's so disgusting about animated GIFs of men jerking off? Every boy is going to learn how to do that very soon. Given the abominable state of sex education in many parts of the world, I would much rather kids learned about sex on Wikipedia than on porn sites that grossly misrepresent the subject matter.
Some of the BDSM and genital mutilation stuff, to be sure, is rather disturbing. Still, those images and videos are on Wikipedia because there are articles that explain relevant topics. It's not like they will turn up when some kid searches for "boobs".
No, it's not OK to post nsfl images everywhere. But no, I don't think that means we should remove them even from places where they are appropriate. Do you want disturbing images removed from anatomy textbooks, too? Kids can easily find those books in libraries, after all.
So should we pour money and time into protecting young eyes? Wikimedia probably agrees with me when I think that this goal is probably impossible and thus a waste of resources.
If parents can't accept that their kids will see a lot of different things online, then they should monitor their children's online activity themselves. Shouldn't parents be the ones who do the parenting?
And last, kids are curious. What is the worst that could happen to curious children viewing porn on the Internet? I think the author of the post has a strong cultural bias against depoctions of sexuality. Wikipedia also contains many graphic depictions of violence. Isn't this much, much worse than pornography?