LOS ANGELES—In 2010, Fox News made a big deal out of alleged porn flooding the online pages of Wikipedia, even going so far as to instigate a campaign of faux terror with the help of Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who accused parent company Wikimedia Commons of distributing child pornography through its websites. A purge of sexual content was subsequently begun by Wikimedia Foundation president Jimmy Wales, but Fox is now reporting that it was an ultimately failed effort that has since been ditched by the Wikipedia board.
“Wikipedia has all but abandoned its efforts to combat the pornographic images littering its servers, after board members could not settle on one of the dozens of technical solutions that could have solved the problem,” reported the news site, which said of the 2010 effort, “While many images were removed during the purge, just as many new images were posted by Wiki users since 2010.”
Taking credit for bringing attention to the alleged problem in the first place, Fox added, “The revelation caused a stir-up at the WikiMedia Foundation that runs the site, leading founder Jimmy Wales to purge hundreds of images and task members with finding a way to keep objectionable material out of children's eyes. But the board could not reach a consensus on the best answer, efforts were simply dropped -- and the problem has been largely ignored.”
But Fox News was not the first entity to complain about sexual content on Wikipedia. As AVN reported at the time, two years earlier, in 2008, WorldNet Daily’s Matt Barber wrote about efforts by the Concerned Women for America to make the online encyclopedia accountable for allegedly making “hardcore, vile pornography” available. Sympathetic to the cause, Barber wrote, "There is raw, unedited homosexual pornography and other videos on this Wikipedia website, a site that so many Americans and people around the world rely upon."
Wikipedia stood its ground at the time, telling the ultra-conservative WorldNet Daily, “Wikipedia's goal is to provide an encyclopedia that contains the sum of all human knowledge. To that end, Wikipedia does not censor objectionable material.” Barber promised to contact the Justice Department to inquire about bringing federal obscenity charges against the site, an effort that obviously went nowhere.
In statements to FoxNews.com, Wikipedia admitted that it has abandoned the effort to meet the standards of social conservatives, and claimed that it cannot even garner a consensus regarding the need to adopt additional methods to censor sexual content.
“This was a major discussion within our community,” Wikimedia spokesperson Jay Walsh told the site. “Thousands [about 24,000] of users contributed to the process. Beyond simply conducting votes, our community also suggested dozens of possible technological models for how an image filter might work, what issues the system would encounter, and how it might be implemented.
“Ultimately,” he added, “our board declared that the results of this referendum were inconclusive, and that no single system would be effective, nor was there consensus about the need for the system.”
