Talk:Internet child pornography/Archive 5

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Does not belong to Wikipedia? But why?
I laughed myself silly at Brass Eye. I think this should be deleted. This is not a "free speech" issue at all. Let's face it - some things simply don't belong on Wikipedia. Removal of material may make total-free-speech people uncomfortable, but they're missing an important point: Wikipedia is certainly not required to carry somebody else's message. If somebody finds it oh-so-important that pedophiles can find their fix, they should pay to host this page themselves. Kirun 19:23, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Yes, some things don't belong on Wikipedia. And some things do. So how about you explain why you think this thing doesn't belong on Wikipedia? Martin 20:00, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Kirun's answer

 * I fail to see how a how-they will be any different to a how-to. If enough details are given so the article can be used by pedophiles, the article should not be there at all. If all such details are removed, the article at most will be a paragraph and should be included as part of another article.


 * As it stands, it doesn't provide the information which it is argued would provide legitimate use. P2P users can't find out how to prevent the spread of child porn (uninstall it is the only thing they can do). It doesn't really help people catch out pedophiles, either. These would really belong in a HOWTO: Prevent Child Porn article in any case


 * Also, the article will attract edits which would provide the kind of information we don't want. Even if they were reverted, they would be available in the history. So keeping this article will provide large amounts of work for the admins, as they would have to keep it clean.


 * The fact that the article is supposedly legal will do nothing to stop campaigners fighting it. They know threatening a lawsuit will be good enough - do we really want to risk this happening?


 * Finally, saying we can't remove articles on moral grounds, because that would be NPOV is nonsense. That seems to work on the assumption that NPOV represents the highest authority. It doesn't. Making an encyclopedia which gives the most benifits the most people is the aim - NPOV is merely one way in which this is achieved. An article which offends a large section of the population and drives them away seems to go against this goal. And not aiding pedophiles certainly carries more weight than a style guideline.


 * Kirun 20:13, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Adam Carr approves

 * Very well said, Kirun. An encyclopaedia cannot place itself outside the values of the society of which it is a part. It cannot say "we are just here to provide anybody with any kind of information they want." Articles which provide detailed instructions on how to perform criminal acts, or which help increase demand for the products of criminal acts (ie pictures of child abuse), should not appear at Wikipedia as a matter of policy, not after a week of debate about the finer points of NPOV-politics. Kirun is also right to say that if the article stands, Wikipedia will get sued by some victim of paedophiles or someone who says they accessed child porn by following advice at Wikipedia. And IMHO Wikipedia will in those circumstances deserve to get sued. Adam

Cyan's comment
I don't mind general information about where kiddie porn comes from, laws about it, police efforts to derail it, or free speech issues surrounding it. What I object to is the information that spells out how to get it. I believe that Wikipedia's reputation would eventually suffer if such information remains in the encyclopedia. -- Cyan 20:44, 10 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Article about how to commit a crime
The article is not about the distinction between US and German law and whether pictures of consenting youths ought or ought not to be illegal, all of which can and should be discussed under paedophilia or child pornography. The article (and let me repeat this) is about how to find pictures of "child pornography" - pictures which must, by definition, involve a real child being sexually abused, sometime, somewhere. An encyclopaedia has no business acting as an enabler for child abuse, even if the information is in some abstract sense "interesting" to some other readers. If anyone disagrees, I will post an article on How to lure your neighbour's six-year old son into your basement and rape, strangle and dismember him without getting caught (and with a bit of research I could write such an article), and see what we think of the informational value of that. Adam 14:34, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Not all the material in this article requires child sexual abuse. In particular, the article talks about computer-generated pornography, slash fiction, nudist photos, and paintings and other works of art.


 * In other news, paedophiles are genetically identical to crabs. *sigh*. Martin 15:24, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * The point, Martin, is not who can most emphatically distance themselves from paedophiles. I haven't accused anyone of being, or sympathising with, paedophiles. The point is what is the purpose of running such an article in an open-access encyclopaedia (which means, in a nice irony, a thing for the general education of children). It has no more legitimate informational value than the hypothetical article I mentioned above. I am astonished that this debate has run as long as it has. The article should be deleted, immediately. Adam

Informative not just for paedophiles

 * It does have informational value, not just for pedophiles. And your hypothetical article could be legitimate too, if it described how people actually lure children into their basements and dismember them without getting caught. Except that's not such a widespread phenomenon, so I don't know how you want to get much information on this. Remember the rule against original research. And the title is too long and shouldn't include "How to". But otherwise, go ahead and write it. --Wik 15:48, Oct 11, 2003 (UTC)


 * child abduction would be a good title. Or you could get specific and help contribute to James Bulger and similar articles. Martin 15:52, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Though my comment is probably unnecessary, the question is very simple: do we want to have such an article like this? I am sure decent wikipedians do not want to help spreading child porn. It does not matter if the article is POV'd or not, factual or not. We do not have duty to provide this kind of information simply. We do not have to cover topics we don't want to. We don't have to have an article we don't want to have. What is so quesionable? -- Taku

Well, is this "an article we don't want to have"? Clearly some people want to have it; otherwise it would never have appeared in the first place, and nobody would be opposing its deletion now. Personally, I found it very informative. I was surprised by quite a lot of its content, which might mean that (a) I lead a very sheltered existence, or (b) this is not very widely available information, or (c) it's made up. Assuming that the answer isn't (c), I think it should be kept, so that others may be similarly informed, if they want to be. Of course, the article needs some work, most importantly to stop it from sounding like a "How-to" article. (I think that any article which tells people to do anything is POV, because that implicitly endorses the activity in question.) But Martin has already made an excellent start at NPOVing, and I'm sure that eventually that particular problem will be well and truly sorted out.

Of course, as well as being NPOV, we have to make sure it's all verifiable. To me, that means that all the information should be found in publically available sources. And I think we had better make that legally available sources, by the way! (Legally in the countries where most of those working on the English-language Wikipedia live, I mean.) Some of the content sounds like original research to me; for example, the bit about finding a strangely-named JPEG file on a P2P network sounds like a personal recollection. I hope that User:Paranoid will see this discussion and remove those sections that are from personal experience, and provide references for those bits that aren't. If everything in the article comes from references available elsewhere then I think we are on safe ground, because we are only summarising what is already public knowledge, and not adding to it. That's what an encyclopaedia should be anyway. (See What Wikipedia is not - the bit about "Primary research".) -- Oliver P. 09:12, 12 Oct 2003 (UTC)

So edit it already
Well, in case anyone was still doubting my early position that procedural (HOW-TO) information has a dangerous tendency to be POV, I think this is an excellent example case. I have no objection to rewriting this article in a fashion in which it explains the origins and distribution of child pornography neutrally instead of giving advice on how to obtain it. The current article is not only procedural, it is grossly POV in its tone and lacks references. For a good example of how to write about child pornography neutrally, see the 1992 article The Trade in Child Pornography by Jan Schuijer and Benjamin Rossen.

Our general policy in cases like these has been: If the article is not rewritten to be useful and NPOV within the deletion period (7 days), dump it. So if Paranoid thinks this is useful information, then he should do the work of getting it into a useful form. That means: Instead of giving advice how to obtain child pornography, describe neutrally, with references, how child pornography is obtained. Vocabulary like "low hanging fruits" is of course entirely inappropriate for such an article.

To all those who express moral outrage, I would however add this: The definitions of child pornography internationally vary greatly. It would be completely legal for me to own pictures of 14-year-olds having sex, even with older persons, because this is not child pornography in Germany (the age of consent is 14). I personally own a copy of the sex ed book "Show Me!" by Will McBride which includes photos of under-10-year-olds exploring each others' genitalia. This book, while surrounded by controversy, is completely legal (because it does not show sexual abuse, which is the definition of child pornography in Germany) and continues to be used in progressive sex-education in Europe.

Aside from that, few would argue that there is no difference between pictures of youths engaging in consensual sex and those of children being raped with older persons (these latter pictures being, by general admission, a small minority in the world wide corpus of child pornography). Yet, US law makes no difference here (in Germany it would be the interpretation of the judge whether the children were abused), and in fact juveniles have been prosecuted under child pornography laws. There are good arguments that can be made for and against possession laws, as well. Child pornography is an issue far too complex to treat it with the emotional moral simplicity that is commonly found when children are involved. &mdash;Eloquence 00:12, Oct 11, 2003 (UTC)


 * Seconded Eloquence's request that Paranoid help rewrite this so it isn't a How To. Martin 15:24, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)