[SharedKnowing] Wikimedia to adopt a stricter porn policy?

[Larry Sanger]

David, you can even maintain your view that Wikipedia and Commons should
stay wonderfully libertine, and yet also agree with Jimmy Wales' actions.
He's saying, basically, that Commons should remove the massive amounts of
redundant and gross stuff that is of use to nobody except porn hunters.
Quite apart from all notions of family-friendliness, a massive porn database
(which is what Commons now includes) is a mighty funny extension of the
missions of reference and education.  Or do you want to maintain that the
causes of reference and education are furthered by having as much of the
stuff as possible?  If you think it's reasonable to limit the amounts, well,
then you're not disagreeing with Jimmy Wales, it seems to me.

Also, I'm puzzled because on the one hand you say that porn is "portrayal of
sexual activity intended to arouse sexual desire," yet you immediately go on
to say that you can only judge whether something arouses *you*.  So you seem
to conclude that something is considered porn only if it excites *you*.
Well, what if you found pornography thoroughly disgusting, as some people
do?  Would you say that there is no such thing as pornography for them
because none of it excites them?  Anyway, it was literally false, and
obviously so, to say that "I can only judge [that something is porn] on the
basis of whether they tend to excite me."  You might be an unexcitable old
geezer, like Cephalus in Book 1 of the Republic, and yet you can certainly
determine that most of the pictorials in "Penthouse" and most of the movies
made by Tera Patrick are porn.

What you say regarding pornography--implying that pictures of semen on a
woman's face, fully graphic displays of anal sex, "fisting," and much, much
more of the same, are *not* pornography--is merely grasping at straws.  If
that's not pornography, then nothing is.  I suspect that you simply dislike
the whole concept of "pornography" at least when somebody is talking about
making rules against it.  There is a more honest and courageous way to state
your position.  You can say that you fully embrace the inclusion of
pornography in a reference work.  If there's nothing wrong with it, why not
say so?

If you say that, I'm not going to argue with you on that; I haven't stated
my full views on the subject, which would take me a long time to do.  I just
thought it was very newsworthy that Wales took this action.  I'll save my
own philosophizing on the subject for another time.

--Larry
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Lawrence M. Sanger, Ph.D. | http://www.larrysanger.org/ 
Editor-in-Chief, Citizendium | http://www.citizendium.org/ 
Executive Director, WatchKnow | http://www.watchknow.org/ 
sanger at citizendium.org