If you find porn offensive, stop searching for it!

Davey Winder
Saturday, 13 September 2008 19:19

Business IT - Networking

The head of Australian child protection charity Childwise, Bernadette McMenamin, asks if "we really need to see a woman masturbating on Wikipedia? Do we really need to see so many seconds of ejaculation?"

The answer, of course, is that it depends on what 'the crowd' think, in its wisdom. That is how Wikipedia operates, and if specific images or videos are found to be offensive by enough Wikipedia visitors then they will get removed.

Editors already remove images depicting acts of child or animal abuse as a matter of course, and pornography for the sake of it tends to go the same way. The trouble is, with more than 10 million individual entries in 253 languages, it can be hard work keeping on top of them all.

It is possible, if you sign up for a free Wikipedia account so that it can drop a cookie on your system to keep track of your preferences, to disable the display of images for specific articles or site-wide for 'bad images.'

Wikipedia keeps a bad image list, and once logged in you can simply specify that all the images that are listed at MediaWiki:Bad be hidden. Just change your personal JavaScript page as described on Wikipedia itself.

Alternatively, you can take advice from my late father who used to say 'if porn offends you so much, stop looking at it' which, in the case of Wikipedia could be adapted to:

If you find porn offensive, stop searching for it!