Results tagged “Wikipedia”

According to a FOXNews.com exclusive investigation, inspired in part by this blog's April 20th post Wikipedophilia:

Wikipedia has become home base for a loose worldwide network of pedophiles who are campaigning to spin the popular online encyclopedia in their favor and are trying to lure more people into their world, an investigation by FoxNews.com confirms.

Chat room posts show a clear effort by pedophiles to use Wikipedia, which can be accessed unfiltered in public schools across the country, to further their agenda. Message board posts often include links to specific Wikipedia articles that the participants say need to be edited to "normalize" pedophile behavior in the public eye and to recruit more pedophiles into their community.

“Pedophiles have campaigned to push their point of view that 'pedophilia is OK and doesn’t hurt children' on Wikipedia,” says Xavier Von Erck, director of the online pedophile watchdog organization Perverted Justice Foundation and Wikisposure.com, its offshoot project devoted to tracking pedophiles and pedophile activism on Wikipedia. “This has been a problem since Wikipedia started.

A series of FOXNews.com exposés last month resulted in a shakeup at the top levels of Wikipedia as administrators tried to deal with the growing controversy surrounding pornographic images that appear on the online encyclopedia and its associated websites.

After much pressure from within the Wikipedia community, co-founder Jimmy Wales was forced to relinquish his top-level control over the encyclopedia's content, as well as all of its parent company's projects.

According to FOXNews.com, though he remains the chairman emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation, Wales is no longer able to delete files, remove administrators, assign projects or edit any content. Essentially he has gone from having free reign over the content and people involved in the websites to having the same capabilities of a low-level administrator.

Insider sources and publicly available internal listserve discussions revealed that Wikimedia editors rebelled against Wales' attempts to remove pornographic images from the nonprofit's websites. Those images were the subject of heated discussion within the community since their existence was revealed by FoxNews.com on April 27.

Hundreds of listserve discussions among Wikimedia board members, administrators and editors reveal the eruption of a heated and chaotic debate over whether to delete the images, which legal analysts say may violate pornography and obscenity laws.

On May 7, FoxNews.com reported exclusively that Wales had personally deleted many of the images from Wikimedia's servers, and that he'd ordered that thousands more be purged. Now many of those images have been restored to their original web pages.

For more on these stories visit:

EXCLUSIVE: Shakeup at Wikipedia in Wake of Porn Purge

EXCLUSIVE: Pedophiles Find a Home on Wikipedia

ChildLaw Blog posts on Wikipedia

Sometimes one thing leads to another and then another and then ultimately purgatory. That's exactly where Wikipedia is finding itself after a tip on ChildLaw blog led to this FoxNews.com story which led to action by Congress and now this. According to FoxNews.com:

The parent company of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is rapidly purging thousands of explicit pornographic images from its websites as it prepares to announce a new policy regarding sexually explicit content in response to reporting by FoxNews.com.

The move came as FoxNews.com was in the process of asking dozens of companies that have donated to Wikimedia Foundation -- the umbrella group behind Wikimedia Commons and its Wiki projects, including Wikipedia -- if they were aware of the extent of graphic and sexually explicit content on the sites.

Among the donors to Wikimedia Commons who were contacted by FoxNews.com were Google, Microsoft's Bing, Yahoo!, Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation, Best Buy, USA Networks and Craigslist Foundation.

These images were and in some cases still are easily accessible to anyone, including school children, many of whom receive unfiltered access to Wiki projects in schools across the country. A child doing homework research on the educational website could easily stumble upon pornographic photos — including close-ups of genitalia and people having sex and masturbating. There's even a “nude children” category.

Check out the entire late breaking story here at FoxNews.com!

FoxNews.com was recently informed that the day after the Wikipedophilia post appeared on this blog, Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, sent a copy of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger's letter to the FBI. Rep. Steve Austria, R-Ohio, sent a copy of the same letter to the FBI on April 27. Perhaps this is the kind of bi-partisanship we've all been waiting for. Stay tuned for updates which are posted here on FoxNews.com.

An interesting side note: Wikipedia apparently got its start in the world of online pornography. According to an article on Wikipedia:

Bomis (pronounced /ˈbɒmɨs/ to rhyme with "promise") is a dot-com company founded in 1996. Its primary business is the sale of advertising on the Bomis.com search portal. It was founded by [the current head of Wikipedia] Jimmy Wales and Tim Shell, and provided support for the free encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia.

On the Bomis.com site, Bomis creates and hosts web rings around search terms popular among male users. The rings are currently categorized broadly as "Babe", "Entertainment", "Sports", "Adult", "Science fiction", and "Other". The "Adult", "Babe", and "Entertainment" categories are the most frequently updated and the most popular. Revenue from search-related pages is generated from advertising and affiliate marketing.

Bomis ran a website called Bomis Premium at premium.bomis.com until 2005, offering customers access to premium, X-rated pornographic content.

Until mid-2005, Bomis also featured the Bomis Babe Report, a free blog, publishing news and reviews about celebrities, models, and the adult entertainment industry. The Babe Report prominently linked to Bomis Premium and frequently posted updates about new models joining Bomis. Bomis has also operated nekkid.info, a free repository of selected erotic photographs, and continues to host The Babe Engine, "a precision babe search engine", which indexes photos ranging from glamour photography to pornography.

Bomis is best known for having supported the creation of the free-content online encyclopedia projects Nupedia and Wikipedia. Bomis hosted Nupedia in 2000, and Larry Sanger was hired to manage and edit that project.

For a while, Bomis provided web servers and bandwidth for these projects, paid Sanger in his role as project editor-in-chief (until he left the projects in 2002), and owned key items such as the associated domain names. However, as the costs of Wikipedia rose with its popularity, Bomis' revenues declined as result of the dot-com-crash, a general reluctance to display advertising on the site—together with a desire from the Wikipedia community to reflect the spirit of openness and neutrality central to Wikipedia—suggested an alternative ownership model.

The Wikimedia Foundation was formally announced on June 20, 2003. All intellectual property and domain name assets were transferred or donated over to the foundation because it was registered as a non-profit organization, but the server hardware was not transferred. Bomis CEO Tim Shell became the Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees. Larry Sanger had left the project by this time, but Jimmy Wales retains a role on the board of the Foundation, along with users elected from the Wikimedia community. In December 2006 Tim Shell was replaced by Jan-Bart de Vreede. The Foundation now funds the operation of Wikipedia (and its sister projects) primarily through donations from readers.

Read the full post about Bomis on Wikipedia here (as long as it lasts).

Yesterday, FOXNews.com published this story online entitled "Wikipedia Distributing Child Porn, Co-Founder Tells FBI." Now both the Wikimedia Foundation and one subject of the exposé, Erik Möller, have responded.

According to the Wikimedia blog:

The story repeats serious falsehoods and offers information taken grossly out of context, resulting in what amounts to a deliberate misrepresentation of reality.

The Wikimedia Foundation is appalled and angry that Erik’s employment with us has resulted in him becoming a target, and we believe that recklessly maligning him is indefensible

On the topic of allegedly illegal materials on Wikipedia and our projects: The Wikimedia Foundation obeys the law. In the weeks since Sanger’s published allegations, the Wikimedia Foundation has not been contacted by the FBI or any other law-enforcement agency with regard to allegedly illegal content on any Wikimedia projects.

Read the full post here. Wikipedia Deputy Director Erik Möller also responded to the FOXNews.com report on his blog:

Today, past defamatory allegations based on an anonymous smear letter which distorted and misrepresented early online comments and writings of mine, were resurrected by Fox News. I want to say definitively: I do not defend nor support acts of sexual violence against children and have never defended pedophilia in any way. Any claims to the contrary are false and a deliberate distortion of my views. Any repetition of those claims is, at best, reckless and irresponsible.

I’ve remained silent on these issues until now, so not to give credence and visibility to these falsehoods. But now, it seems obvious to me that the issue may be regularly revived, and therefore, I want to set the record straight. The experience of being defamed in this fashion has been highly traumatic and distressing to me.

. . . . 

Two years ago, a Silicon Valley gossip blog operated by Gawker Media, called Valleywag, began a smear campaign against Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation which runs it. Following attacks focused on the personal life of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, in May 2008 the blog ran a series of posts by Owen Thomas which defamed me by calling me a “defender of pedophilia”, deriving its claims from articles and comments I wrote in 2000 and 2001, mixed with malicious fabrications and insinuations.

The defamatory claims which originated in that blog were repeated in a small number of other blogs without deeper reflection. They were not picked up by mainstream media at the time.

The defamation campaign by Gawker was deeply hurtful to me. At the time, I also met with an attorney specializing in defamation, who assessed the claims and confirmed his opinion that they constituted legal defamation, but who also made it clear that trying to have the posts taken down would be very expensive and time-consuming. It was also obvious that any legal action would serve to amplify the visibility of the original posts, and would drive traffic to Valleywag.

I had no reason to believe that Valleywag would engage in a responsible dialogue: quite the opposite. And I didn’t want to increase its public profile. Therefore, I decided then that it was best to ignore the claims, rather than responding to them. It may not have been the right decision, but at the time I believed it was the best among many bad options available to me.

. . . . 

At this point, I believe it’s preferable to have a full response to these defamatory claims on the record, rather than letting them go unchallenged. If you write about this situation, I would ask you to provide a reference to this response where relevant, and to avoid linking directly to the defamatory claims in question, both to avoid perpetuating the libel, and to avoid further driving page views to its publishers.

I have no problem being called out for things that I believe. Even attacking me based on things I wrote in my late teens or early twenties without giving me a chance to weigh in is, while not fair play, forgivable. But defaming me based on deliberate, malicious misconstruction of old writings , attributing claims to me which I have never made, describing me as a person who would defend sexual violence against children - that is completely beyond the pale, it is shocking, and it is unforgivable.

Nature of the defamatory claims

The key defamatory claims originally made by Gawker include:

1.  That I am a “defender of pedophilia”:

Pedophilia is a mental disorder which causes adults to be sexually attracted to children. Pedophiles who act upon these impulses commit abhorrent acts of sexual violence against children. I have not defended pedophilia in any of my writings.

2.  That I have argued that “non-violent child pornography does no harm”:

I have never made such an argument. This claim is apparently based on the malicious insertion of the word “child” into a heading from an article which stated “non-violent pornography does no harm”, based on an interpretation of a German-to-English machine translation. Child sexual abuse is an abhorrent crime, and the depiction of child sexual abuse, and the trade in such depictions, are rightly criminalized.

3.  That I “oversee editorial operations” at Wikipedia, or otherwise control its content:

Wikimedia’s projects are governed by volunteer communities. Individual Wikimedia Foundation staff members, including myself, do not control or direct editorial changes. I am not sure why Valleywag made that claim, which it presumably knows to be false. I can only assume its goal was to amplify excitement and outrage about the story, by implying that I was personally influencing Wikipedia’s articles on controversial topics.

Gawker Media made several other insinuations and defamatory claims in its posts which are so over-the-top that they are barely worth rebutting; one post attributed an edit to the Wikipedia article about child sexual abuse to me which was made well before my first edit to it, based on an incorrect reading of the edit history. That post was completely false.

My writings about sexuality

My writings about sexuality focus on the core topics of pleasure/affection, pornography, censorship, and children’s sexuality. Not a single article I published either as a journalist or as a blogger focuses on the topic of pedophilia. There’s a reason for that: I have never had any interest in the topic.

Indeed, in order to support the claim that I am a “defender of pedophilia”, the anonymous defamer had to dig deep into my writings. Nine years ago, at the age of 22, I wrote an article titled “Defending the Right to Pleasure“. The article has nothing to do with pedophilia; it doesn’t mention the issue. To find a snippet worth quoting, the defamer had to dig further into the comments section of the article, where I wrote a 3,000 word response addressing various comments.

Pulling from this long, carelessly written comment, the anonymous smear letter, followed by Gawker and later Fox News, quoted three sentences out of context: “What is my position on pedophilia, then? It’s really simple. If the child doesn’t want it [sexual contact], is neutral or ambigious [sic], it’s inappropriate.” It omitted the sentence immediately following: “This excludes most adult/child sexual contact, but only little child/child contact.”

If you read the entire piece, the context of the comment and the article are clear: They argue for a less zealous approach to policing consensual sexual relationships among young people of comparable age.

. . . . 

I have consistently defended the right of children of comparable age to engage in consensual, harmless sexual interactions with each other - what’s commonly called “playing doctor”, and also safe sex among teens. I have never defended the “right” of pedophiles to abuse children; child sexual abuse is a crime, and there is no such right. Children also don’t have the ability to consent to sexual activity with pedophiles, and such activities are sexual violence against children by definition.

All my writings (including the above comment in context) are consistent with this view. One particularly pertinent article that I wrote about the topic of children’s sexuality is called “Gefaehrliche Doktorspiele” (”Dangerous doctor games”), which describes the results of several weeks of journalistic research I had done into the criminalization and pathologization of consensual child sexual activity. Many of my views on the topic are also well-reflected by Judith Levine’s excellent book “Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex”.

Sexual violence against children, like all violence against children, is abhorrent. 9 years ago, as a 22-year-old student, I wrote about these topics with an eye to issues and questions that gave me pause - the implied consensus that children are asexual creatures, that sexuality is a switch that is flipped on with adulthood, that non-violent adult pornography is harmful to minors, etc. I didn’t believe those things then, and I don’t believe them now.

The difference between then and now is that those topics are no longer the focus of anything I write about or do. If I did write about them today, I would take greater care to reassure any reader that I, too, believe that sexual violence against children is a horrific crime inflicted upon the weakest members of society. I have always believed that, and any suggestion to the contrary is false.

Make sure to read Mr. Möller's full response here.

I've been sitting on this story for quite some time waiting for something significant to make it relevant. Now that time has come. About two years ago, rumors started floating around about Wikipedia's involvement with child pornography and the pedophile agenda. First there was a row about this image on Wikipedia depicting child nudity.

Then there was the long-standing allegation by Perverted Justice that:

Pedophiles have long sought to use Wikipedia to justify and promote their agenda. They organize together in order to create Wikipedia accounts and then seek to use Wikipedia's all-inclusiveness to promote their point of view. When pointed out, Wikipedians themselves often don't believe that there is an organized campaign to subvert the user-edited encyclopedia in order to promote the pedophile agenda.

Well now these allegations have risen to a new level. Last week, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger reported the site's parent organization to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, saying he believes the Wikimedia Commons "may be knowingly distributing child pornography."

According to Sanger:

The clearest instances I found (I did not want to look for long) are linked from [the pedophilia page] and [the lolicon page]. I don’t know if there is any more, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is-the content on the various Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and various others, are truly vast.

You can see on [the history of the category page] that the page has existed for three years. Considering that Eric Möller, a high-level Wikipedia manager, is well known for his views in defense of pedophilia… surely the existence of this page must have come to the attention of those with the legal responsibility for the Wikimedia projects.

Erik Möller was recently elevated to Deputy Director of the Wikimedia Foundation which controls Wikipedia. In 2000, long before his Wikipedophilia days, Möller gave a speech in Nuremberg entitled “Kinder sind Pornos” which means “children are pornography.” Even in Google’s rough translation, the gist is clear enough: Möller argues that nonviolent child pornography does no harm.

Other sites have also discussed Möller's seeming fixation on child sexuality and child pornography. According to the blog Cyde Weys:

Erik Möller has a rather . . . deep interest in child sexuality, and some “interesting” positions on it to boot.

I’m not the first to pick up on this, either. Valleywag quotes Erik as saying “What is my position on pedophilia, then? It’s really simple. If the child doesn’t want it, is neutral or ambiguous, it’s inappropriate.” Obviously, that’s leaving something important unsaid — namely, are children really mature enough to decide if they do want sex; and if they say they do, does that make it appropriate?

But there are some other things that haven’t come to light yet. I’ll just list them off and let his words speak for themselves.

Erik created the Wikipedia article on Child Sexuality in 2003, and it was definitely not a stub article (Wikipedia’s parlance for short, introductory articles intended to be expanded upon by others).

He inserted the following text into the article on Human Sexual Behavior:

"It is generally acknowledged that children are capable of feeling sexual pleasure, even if they are not yet able to engage in sexual intercourse with each other, and/or are not yet biologically able to reproduce."

In the article on Homosexuality and Morality, he writes:

“A small minority believes that children are capable of consenting to homosexual acts with older men, but all major pro-homosexual groups have rejected that view.”

And he has a rather curious definition of pedophilia:

"Again, someone who sexually abuses a minor is not necessarily a pedophile (”exclusively” ”attracted” to ”preadolescents” — emphasis on every word), but may simply be acting out of opportunity. The title “pedophiles and pederasts” is redundant — pedophilia ”includes” pederasty. This does not in any way mitigate the definitional problems of this article."

Now that judicial opinions, newspapers and scholarly reports increasingly cite to Wikipedia, it doesn't take too much imagination to believe that individuals with agendas see Wikipedia as a perfect vehicle to promote their viewpoint. Anonymous editors and anonymous contributors with anonymous oversight, little or no authoritative peer review, and almost universal knee jerk acceptance make Wikipedia a powerful and dangerous place.

As we cede more and more control of our intelligence to the Googles and Wikipedias of the world, we need to remember that sophisticated invisible forces can easily manipulate our view of reality. Just who is editing and controlling Wikipedia? There's more than just the Lower Merion School District in your child's bedroom. Wikipedophilia might be the most dangerous threat of all.