Wikipedia blasts talk of child porn at website

April 28, 2010
Wikipedia on Wednesday strongly rejected its departed co-founder's accusation that the online encyclopedia served up child pornography.

Wikipedia on Wednesday strongly rejected its departed co-founder's accusation that the online encyclopedia served up child pornography.

"Our community abhors issues around pornography and pedophilia and they don't want to provide opportunities for these things to take place," spokesman Jay Walsh told AFP.

"We don't have material we would deem to be illegal. If we did, we would remove it."

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who left the project in 2002 due to what he described as disagreements, said in an online post that he was probably mistaken to use the term "child pornography" when describing his complaint about drawings or cartoons accompanying some pedophilia-related entries.

"I didn't realize that it would be so misleading," Sanger said.

"It didn't occur to me until afterward that many people restrict 'child pornography' to mean photographs of real children. If I had realized this sooner, I would have used 'depictions of child sexual abuse' instead."

Sanger detailed his concerns in a letter sent to the FBI early in April.

"I thought I was doing my civic duty, one that I didn't really want to do, but which I felt I ought to do," Sanger said.

As of Wednesday, neither Wikipedia nor the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation behind the had heard from the authorities, according to Walsh.

"As a serious, law-abiding organization we would work with these folks," he said.

Wikipedia is a communally-crafted online compendium of knowledge that is curated with the help of some 100,000 volunteer editors.

"In general there is a constant change in information at Wikipedia," Walsh said. "If inappropriate material is posted volunteers remove it immediately."

Explore further: Microsoft closing Encarta online encyclopedia

Related Stories

Wikipedia launches iPhone application

August 20, 2009

Wikipedia said it has released an iPhone application as part of a drive to open the pages of its revered online encyclopedia to the booming ranks of smart phone users.

Wikipedia operator gets $500,000 foundation grant

August 21, 2009

(AP) -- The nonprofit organization that operates the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia has received a $500,000 grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to expand its work bringing free educational content ...

Google donates $2 million to support Wikipedia

February 17, 2010

(AP) -- Google Inc., the Internet's most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web's most-read sites.

Recommended for you

On soft ground? Tread lightly to stay fast

October 8, 2015

These findings, reported today, Friday 9th October, in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomechanics, offer a new insight into how animals respond to different terrain, and how robots can learn from them.

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.
http://phys.org/news/2010-04-wikipedia-blasts-child-porn-website.html
phys.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-40
82506
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BB57PUCAG2YAPYYGNMU3UAWWSRG6CAGV
<urn:uuid:52c05f56-0e67-40f8-bf53-2875a6830257>
2015-10-08T23:38:03Z
69.9.167.167
sha1:EEI7B3SDMDKWUTUV56VITRFGVTOU5LY3
<urn:uuid:0ac674a2-cabf-4f5e-bde5-b6e7ab93c5ba>
http://phys.org/news/2010-04-wikipedia-blasts-child-porn-website.html
response
<urn:uuid:af793a9f-d57d-4e37-b59b-c9b5bff5bd87>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-137-6-227.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-40
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf