Explicit image featured on German Wikipedia's main page
Explicit image featured on Wikipedia's main page, despite request from Jimbo Wales
On 21 March, the German Wikipedia's home page featured the entry on Vulva as the "article of the day", including an explicit anatomical photo as part of the teaser. Unsurprisingly, this generated considerable controversy, with the discussion on the main page talk page alone surpassing 500 kB and at least 42 protest e-mails reaching the German OTRS team. Achim Raschka, describing himself as the main author of the article and a "40-year-old biologist with three children" justified the decision, mentioning the desire to demonstrate that it was possible to write "an objective, respectful, reference-based and adequate article" about such a topic, and defending his choice of the teaser image.
Alerted on his talk page on the English Wikipedia, Jimbo Wales commented " I'm astonished [the image] is there, and not in a good way" and shortly afterwards asked German Wikipedians to remove it:
I won't do anything directly here, but I beg you all to quickly remove this image from the home page and have a review of your processes to see how to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. This is not an issue of censorship, but as someone has said, a matter of the "Principle of Least Astonishment". This is my opinion, you may do with it as you wish.
However, the image was not removed, and Jimbo Wales later contented himself with announcing his intention to discuss the issue with members of the German community on an upcoming trip to Berlin, threatening to climb the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man.
Outside Wikipedia, the issue attracted the interest of many bloggers and generated hundreds of (mostly amused) tweets. However, media coverage remained limited to Telepolis and a short mention in Spiegel online.
(See earlier Signpost coverage related to explicit images on Wikipedia: January 2009, May 2008, August 2007, September 2006.)
Briefly
- The FlaggedRevs developing team invites users to test an implementation of Flagged protection, the configuration of the Flagged Revisions extension which is proposed to be deployed on the English Wikipedia.
- In a blog post, TheDJ reported on recent progress with the usability initiative's template folding mechanism and template editor, an important part of its ongoing efforts to make the edit window more user-friendly. A preliminary version can now be tried out on prototype.wikimedia.org.
- Credo Reference (formerly Xrefer), a US company that offers subscription-based online reference content, recently donated 100 free user accounts to Wikipedians to help them in their day-to-day research as Wikipedia editors. Distributed on a first come, first served basis among users with at least 600 article namespace edits and at least six months of editing, the maximum number of applications was reached within a few hours on 18 March.
- Sue Gardner's reports to the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation for December 2009 and January 2010 have been published.
- As in recent years, the Wikimedia Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC).
This week in history
- 2005: Creative Commons unveils new license for wikis
- 2007: Policy changes
- 2009: Abuse Filter is enabled
Discuss this story
The link to the "teaser" either is broken or has been removed. The link to the discussion includes a number of pictures of, well, vulvas, so I assume one of them was the contentious image, but my German is almost non-existent. Matt Deres ( talk) 20:40, 24 March 2010 (UTC) reply
I must say, while the image itself doesn't bother me at all, I think calling it a "teaser image" is somewhat unfortunate. :-) -- Danger ( talk) 03:57, 25 March 2010 (UTC) reply
Teaser? Teaser? This is a SCANDAL! Kayau Voting IS evil 14:03, 25 March 2010 (UTC) reply
As a photographer, I'd say that the picture is very well done. If it weren't for it's contentiousness, I'd consider nominating it as a 'best of' image. Darkonc ( talk) 14:25, 27 March 2010 (UTC) reply
Ow, you know, I find that I seem to be standing on Jimbo's side whenever I read the signpost. I mean, last time with wikinews I agreed with him, and this time too. You know, the pic really shouldn't be displayed, even on de pedia, since it can stir up a bit too much of controversy. Kayau Voting IS evil 03:07, 28 March 2010 (UTC) reply
A comment from Germany: The sparse media coverage should give a good impression on how the things are seen here. In the US and the UK the connection between nudity and sex is close. In Germany this connection is not always given. The Freikörperkultur movement is well established and by seeing a nude person at a beach most people will not think that this person will only be there to be involved in some morally questionable action. I remember seeing topless girls in soap commercials in the 1980s repeating every now and than for several years, and there was no media reaction at all. The famous Nipple-gate was mostly viewed as a strange expression of double moral standard of a nation with the largest pornography industry in the world. I talked to a few people about it and most of them did not care, but were amused that Jimbo Wales tried to step in. I liked best the comment of a women writing that 50% have what the article is written others have already seen something similar and the rest is discussing it at that talk page.-- Stone ( talk) 18:54, 28 March 2010 (UTC) reply
I have to say that the decision to put that image on the main page of an encyclopaedia was extremely bad taste. Yes we have a responsibility to provide neutral, uncensored information and I agree that. However, we should not go out of our way to display graphic images like that in places where people would not expect it nor want it. I’m sure there are many people thinking to themselves "Think of the children or the people at work" and I have to agree with that, how many kids would have opened Wikipedia to do their work just to be repulsed by that? If this kind of stupidity becomes commonplace, I foresee the WMF projects being blacklisted by the very educational institutions that use it on a day to day basis. Yes, we are an encyclopaedia, but we are also a top 10 website. If Goatse.cx became featured would you put an image of it on the main page in the name of "anti-censorship"? I doubt it, hence, on the same principal moral restraint must be exercised when choosing main page images. Good on Jimbo for pointing out the obvious problems with that image and to all those complaining about Jimbo voicing his opinion, he is well entitled to it, If you dont want him getting involved in anything, start acting mature and he wont have to. «l| Promethean ™|l» (talk) 02:26, 30 March 2010 (UTC) reply