User:AnonEMouse/AdultDVDTalk

AdultDVDTalk, a forum discussing adult films, had a thread on Wikipedia's coverage of pornographic performers. http://forum.adultdvdtalk.com/forum/topic.dlt/topic_id=112336/forum_id=1/cat_id=1/112336.htm Some issues were brought up there that I hoped I'd be able to help answer.

I should probably start by saying that basically everything that Morbidthoughts says in that thread is right. I'd say some of it a slightly different way, but he is basically correct. I'm a bit more experienced, so can add more detail to some of the answers, but I'm saying much the same thing.

How reliable is Wikipedia on porn star bios?
Q: "wikipedia how reliable is it on porn star bios? I know sometimes the stuff on general info is off so I am figuring same with porn stars."


 * "DO NOT take anything you find on Wikipedia as truth. The problem with Wikipedia is that it's designed to be socially edited, and by extension, reflect the "wisdom" of multiple users. Unfortunately, the porn entries usually aren't widely edited..."


 * "The overall quality is very high, but any given page at any given moment could be sort of a mess. Use it for background knowledge, then check the references."

- Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia


 * I don't know, it's a hit or miss thing. A lot of people mean well and work hard to make the entries accurate. ... But I don't know how up to date or accurate porn stars entries are... Lauren Phoenix, was she really hired to model tube socks & underwear for American Apparel? She's Canadian.

A: Yes, that's about right, it is sometimes off. Possibly even more so than other articles. But not a lot more. Here are some of the reasons for this, roughly in descending order.


 * 1) First, "anyone can edit", so any given minute, a bored 10 year old might have decided to replace someone's name with the name of the Physics teacher that gave him a D- on his last test. (With pornography articles, we can hope it's a bored 19 year old :-) ...) We (Wikipedia editors) generally catch 90%, even 99%, of simple vandalism like that and revert in minutes, but you might be looking at a version in those minutes, or might be looking at one of those that got missed. (See also a humorous suggestion on fixing this problem.)
 * 2) Second, pornography articles especially do seem to be prone to attracting people with rather simple senses of humor like that, and can be sometimes short of knowledgeable editors to watch over them and fix them, since there is a stigma to knowing a lot about pornography. (Both of these observations come as a shock, I know. Who would have guessed?)
 * 3) Third, pornography tends to be a strange mixture of the flashy and the secretive. What most people outside the industry consider public - names, for example - is often considered private, while what most people outside the industry consider private - nudity, sexuality - is often not just public, but outright advertised, even spammed. There is a lot of hype and misinformation out there. It is not uncommon for a pornographic performer to have half a dozen different stage names. Meanwhile, their real name has to be on file with the producers, by US law, so can probably be accessed by a dedicated enough fan. It's not uncommon that a fan will find what probably is a performer's real name, and happily add it to the encyclopedia, thinking they are helping, and will be disappointed when they hear that we won't add it without verifiable sources.
 * 4) Fourth, pornography is inherently controversial. Articles are sometimes blanked or nominated for deletion by people who simply don't like pornography at all, or think it is wrong, or vulgar, or exploitative, or unencyclopedic, or some combination of all of those. That happens a lot less often to articles on other subjects, for some reason.
 * 5) Fifth, there can be a nasty side to the industry. (Again, I know this comes as a shock to everyone who thought it was all sweetness and light.) It has happened that a rival, or even a disappointed former fan, will try to hurt a performer by spreading either uncomfortable truths, or outright lies, about them, through email messages, or forums that then get picked up, or just straight by editing their article. This is rarer than the other cases, but can be the hardest to fix.

Most of this is not unique to pornography, by the way. It's not the only controversial subject: abortion, politics, and similar issues also share these problems. Sometimes it's even less clear why an article is being vandalized: two of the most heavily vandalized articles in my experience have been Clara Barton (nurse, founder of the American Red Cross) and Zheng He (Chinese explorer and navigator), that you wouldn't think would be particularly attractive to vandals. Apparently a couple of high schools with internet access seem to have decided these would be fun topics to play with.

How can you tell if something is accurate, and not just put in by a high school kid making a joke? Well, as Jimbo says, check the references. That's why Verifiability is so important. Did Lauren Phoenix really model for American Apparel? Go to the article, find that sentence, check the reference. The San Francisco Chronicle for Friday, June 24, 2005 says that she did, and even goes on about the event a fair bit. It's even online, so even easier to check. We can't guarantee things are true, all we can guarantee is that reliable sources said so.

Editing own entry
Q: "A person isn't allowed to edit their own entry on wikipedia?"


 * "My wikipedia profile is wrong. I spent forever fixing the info & then the next day it got turned back because I didn't have references to verify."


 * "I have edited my own Wikipedia entry - SEVERAL TIMES - and they keep changing it back. Because really, even though I stated on Wikipedia that it WAS ME making the corrections that wasn't good enough and time and time again they would change it back to the same old bullshit that someone had posted on there that was a bunch of WRONG information transcribed from a radio interview (the info got twisted in the transcribing)."

A: It's a bit more complex than that. The policy is called Autobiography (a subset of Conflict of interest), and it boils down to "Avoid writing or editing an article about yourself, other than to correct unambiguous errors of fact.".

The basic idea is that it is very hard to write about yourself objectively. It's too easy to emphasize what puts you in a good light, "forget" to mention things you aren't proud of, and make it a "puff piece". Another problem is that it is too easy to write things that you know are true but no one else can check. Our word for that, facts that others can check, is Verifiability.

Verifiability is very important. The need for that is partly due to the fact that anyone can edit. A sentence that says "Jane went to school at UCLA" might be perfectly true, or might be something made up by a bored 10 year old one day. We need a reliable source reference that says that, usually a book or magazine article, that others can check, and correct if it is not right. ("No, look, in this issue it clearly says she went to NYU.") This might seem ridiculous ("It's me, Jane, darn it, I'm telling you, I went to UCLA, that magazine issue is wrong!"), but you have to realize that others don't know that people editing a Wikipedia article are who they claim to be. We have had cases of impersonation. It's not hard to claim to be someone else on the Internet (for example). Even if you can convince one reader that you are you, by mentioning things only you would know, how about the next one, looking at the article in six months, or two years, how should they know you didn't just trick the last person? That's why we need sources for information.

Pornographic performers have a mixed blessing here - they don't get as much coverage in mainstream newspapers as other actors, but they usually have their own web sites. Biographies on the person's own web site, if there is a reliable source that says that this is their web site, are considered reliable sources for most facts that aren't too controversial, or too blatantly self-promotional. In other words, if your bio says "I went to UCLA", that's generally a fine source to put that in your article. If it says "I am the sexiest person in history", we'll consider that just a bit questionable.

If you want to add something we don't say yet, the suggested way to do that is to add it to the article talk page. Add a reference to a source, sources are important. "Hi, I'm Jane, and it was my sister who went to NYU, I really went to UCLA. That magazine article is wrong, here is one that gets it right." If you prefer, you don't even have to prove you're you, you can just write: "Look, here on Jane's official site, on the bio page http://jane.com/mybio.html she says she went to UCLA." Though of course demonstrating that you can edit your official site is a good way to prove you are, in fact, you.

So what about "unambiguous errors of fact" then, if you don't have a web site, or can't be bothered to edit it to have every little thing in it? Well, if you see something clearly incorrect, and it's unsourced, you can delete it. Unsourced generally means there's no reference to the place we got this information from (name of book, name and date of magazine article, or something like that), often given by a little [6] or other number at the end of the sentence or paragraph that is a link to the reference section. Be sure to put in "Removing incorrect, and unsourced information." or something like that in the edit summary, so we won't think you're a 10 year old or a religious conservative on a deletion spree (we do get those). Most incorrect information is unsourced, or sourced to a highly questionable source (internet forum, for example, where no one or only the webmaster can guarantee the person posting is who they say they are). "Removing incorrect, and badly sourced, information." would be a good edit summary for removing something sourced to a chat forum.

If the information is sourced to a publication or expert, but still wrong (that is rare, but does happen), this probably will be when you will need to put up a source for the correct information somewhere else to replace it, or some other well meaning fan will just put in the wrong information again in another six months, sourced to the same incorrect source.

What a pain!
Q: "It is a pain in the ass....like we have nothing better to do than sit around all day trying to correct and recorrect and argue about our own biographies!"

A: Yes, it is. This may seem like a pain to go through, but at least you can do it. You actually can get the wrong information changed, and replaced with the right information. Think about how hard it is to get the information on any other web site changed; you can't edit it at all, right? It could take a lawsuit, if you find the person responsible. Or try changing a magazine that has already been printed and shipped to thousands of subscribers. In a way, this seems frustrating because the editors are responsive, there is someone to argue against. Drop an email to someone who runs a different website, and you are lucky if you hear anything back ever. Here, anyone can just edit the article or the talk page, response is normally fairly fast, a few days, sometimes even a few minutes. Note another comment made in the thread: "(X)'s real name has successfully been removed off of Wikipedia but it's posted on (Y).com". You can't correct and recorrect and argue about it there.

Article deletion and notability
Q: "Wikipedia editors routinely delete articles about various porn stars. The only articles they allow is about porn stars who are 'newsworthy'. In other words, they only accept articles about porn stars whose names have appeared in mainstream news media for one reason or another."

A: Not quite. The rules for who gets an article are called Notability (people). Certainly if someone has appeared in mainstream news media multiple times (Marylin Star), they generally qualify, but so do people who win major adult industry awards (Jill Kelly). Note that having an article isn't necessarily a good thing, it just means the world has noticed you; Wikipedia writes about saints and Nobel laureates but also about terrorists and serial killers.

As mentioned above, pornography articles are inherently controversial. There are people who don't like the subject and think all mention of it should be deleted. There are others who think that anyone with 500 web sites showing photos of them must have demonstrated the world cares about them, so must be notable. The rules above are the compromise we have come up with.

Article pictures
Q: "under a posting about the Creative Commons license, there's a bit I quite like allowing people to post pictures from lukeisback. You know, the guy who's pictures are so fucking poor he calls himself the camera of death. But these guys don't have an axe to grind with porn, noooo."

A: We've got no axe, but we do have a Image use policy. That means that with very rare exceptions we can only use freely licensed images on our pages. We can't just grab the best image available of someone, even if they let us, because then our encyclopedia would not be free for others to reuse. And that's a big deal, one of the reasons the Wikipedia got so big, in fact, is that our work really is free. There are lots of blogs and forums where anyone can post anything they like, but the guy who owns the forum owns the post. This isn't that. Anything in the Wikipedia is free for others to reuse, as long as they give credit appropriately, say where it came from. And that's a big part of why so many people contribute to it, because they know that no one person owns their work; everyone can use it. That's why the Wikipedia got so popular. Images we use need to reusable just like that.

Now LukeIsBack was one of the first places that was willing to make images truly free to reuse, so we use those images. They're walk-by snapshots taken at expos and parties, so not as good as images the subject posed for hours for, but they're an awful lot better than no picture at all, and they're freely licensed, so we can use them. We welcome better pictures, we ask for them all the time. Here is a page full of images that the article subject was willing to make free on request: User:Videmus Omnia/Free Images.

You want better images on articles? Release them, under the WP:GFDL or Creative Commons licenses (Attribution, or Attribution Share-Alike). Those licenses allow others to reuse or edit those pictures with proper credit; GFDL and Share-Alike also require others to make the work they reuse the picture in free. That release is not trivial, it means that if, later, you decide you don't like the fact someone else is using the picture on their website, or in their magazine, you can't legally stop them. A lot of people don't want to release their pictures like that. We can understand the problem, but the free license is a big part of the Wikipedia charter, we can't change it just because you don't like Luke's photos.

If you're willing to take that risk, and truly release a better image that you truly have all the rights to, you can Upload it and fill in the license that explains that you do have the rights to do so, and add it to the article. Or, if that form is too complicated, you can ask a more experienced editor to help: I can (User talk:AnonEMouse), or the guy above (User talk:Videmus Omnia), or someone else who has uploaded an image before. We will use the best image or images available for the article: that means the image that tells the most, which doesn't always mean the prettiest, but if it's just supposed to be a picture of what the person looks like, a prettier image is usually better.

Real names and other personal information
Q: "Wikipedia -- once they're absolutely sure they've got you dead to rights -- wants to put your real name right up there on the fucking web for everyone to see. Woe betide anyone who lets their personal info leak, because they'll never, ever get it removed."
 * "If a "reliable source" publishes a porn person's real name without that person's consent, would that still mean that then it's ok to just continue to spread the news?"
 * "I think the horse is out of the barn with something like a mainstream newspaper but there has been examples where the editors have removed the name anyway."

A: People in pornography sometimes forget how unusual the industry is about real names. Pornographic performers have no trouble selling pictures of themselves nude or even having sex to thousands of people, in fact, the more the better, but letting anyone know their name is considered a violation of privacy. And this is even though, at least in the US, their real name has to be on file by law, so can probably be accessed by a dedicated enough fan. So what often happens is that a fan, a new editor, will find what probably is a performer's real name, and happily add it to the encyclopedia, thinking they are helping. They may not even realize about the pornography real name privacy taboo, they may think it's no more of a big deal than letting someone know that John Wayne was really Marion Morrison. Or they may think porn stars are, by their own choice, public figures that have no reasonable expectation of privacy, like politicians, for example. Others may think it's just extremely valuable to the article: "you can't write an article about a person if you don't know their name" is an opinion that comes up a lot. Quite often a real name is added in perfectly good faith.

Now when a more experienced editor in the field sees the real name being added, we will remove it unless it has very reliable sources; newspapers, magazines with editorial review, the person's own site, books from major publishing companies, something like that. But this isn't like reverting common vandalism, it sometimes takes an experienced editor in the pornography field to notice; an editor who mostly edits articles on Physicists, or even mainstream movie stars, might not realize adding a real name a big deal. There are over 2 million articles in Wikipedia, a bit over 1000 of them are on various aspects of pornography, there just aren't that many pornography-knowledgeable editors. When you see a problem, tell us. If you don't know specific people to go to, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pornography can generally reach field knowledgeable editors.

When the name has been published by a popular reliable source, we generally leave it, on the assumption that it is now public information, or that the article subject did not object to that publication. We do have a policy asking for extra care for articles about Biographies of living persons, and we can leave out minor personal details that we have verifiable sources for that aren't connected with the reason the person became famous -- we're not a tabloid, we don't have to cover every time someone dates someone else, gains weight, loses weight, or goes out to a restaurant -- but in general, a real name isn't a minor detail. In rare cases, we have removed the sourced real name of the article subject, for example if the subject is not very notable, the reliable sources where the information is given aren't that reliable or well known, and the article subject makes a specific request, on the grounds of basic humanity to the subject. But those are exceptions: if Elton John says he wants us to delete that he was born Reginald Dwight, we will politely have to refuse. We are supposed to be neutral, and write what the world knows about someone, not just what the person wants the world to know.

But that's not how it actually works
Q: "I can think of one [article] that appears to be totally fabricated by it's subject and seems to be some kind of vanity project."
 * "The are hundreds of examples of entries on mainstream personalities that list as fact endless opinion, fluff, conjecture, PR, and good, old-fashioned bullshit."
 * "In my experience, Wikipedia is nothing but an oligarchy controlled by otherwise powerless, bitter little men who stake out their tiny electronic territories and then fight to control them with their own egotistical satisfaction of paramount importance above all other concerns."

A: It's a volunteer project with 2 million articles. As a volunteer project, it's a miracle any of them are good. Who would have thought that anyone would write a single, well written, reliably sourced, article, an article that any ten year old could at any time replace with "Fred Is Gay" ... and do it for free? Not I, surely. And yet here we are, amazed not that any of them are good, but that any of them are bad.

What I write here is how things should work. Amazingly enough, it even is actually how things usually do work. But certainly not all the time -- it's such a huge project that you will always find instances that didn't work this way, especially at first -- and certainly not immediately -- it takes a while for them to work this way. There is vanity, there is fluff, there are certainly powerless, bitter little [editors] (Hi! That would be me! :-) ), there is even blatant vandalism. But, believe it or not, things do get fixed, vandalism, vanity, and fluff does get cleaned up. Usually and eventually and given work. And the project is growing exponentially, for every article that gets cleaned up, two more bad ones get added ... but eventually even those do eventually get cleaned up. (By which time, of course, four others have been added. :-))

It's a volunteer project, it's always a work in progress, it will always have something wrong with it. Yet, amazingly enough, it somehow, usually, not always, but more often than not, against all odds, eventually ... works. To an extent. :-) You can rage about it, or you can help. Guess which will make it better.

I guess the only thing I can say is quote three more lines from the thread.
 * "You can defend Wikipedia all you like, but until I meet someone -- in any walk of life -- who feels their Wikipedia entry is, at the very least, accurate (forget not insulting; that, apparently, is too much to ask) I will cleave to this belief..."
 * "Katja is you bio accurate on Wiki"
 * "yes, everything that is said in the current version is true."