Wikipedia:Pornography

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This page documents some of the discussions the

Wikipedia:Profanity
guideline has the advice:

  • "Words and images that would be considered offensive, profane, or obscene by typical Wikipedia readers should be used if and only if their omission would cause the article to be less informative, relevant, or accurate, and no equally suitable alternatives are available. Including information about offensive material is part of Wikipedia's encyclopedic mission; being offensive is not."

Existing policy

Options to hide an image

"

9 votes to 5. Attempts to define what censorship
means were rejected.

Despite this, many images

Wikipedia:Images and media for deletion. One concern expressed is that although Wikipedia is not censored internally, it may be censored externally by others limiting access, and that a balance needs to be struck. In many cases other issues are also included in the debate, such as copyright issues
. Those wishing to retain images usually put forward two arguments: first that any censorship is in principle unacceptable, and second that the particular image in question adds information to an article.

Some examples of debates, decisions and non-decisions

Some of the pages linked here may cause offense to some people. Hence the frequent debates.

Vandalism

In the early days of the site, the "You have new messages" notice that appeared when there was a change to a user's discussion page was a simple link. Vandals found that by turning these talk pages into redirects to explicit images, they could force unsuspecting users to go to view them. This was considered so egregious a form of vandalism that the system message was changed to forbid redirecting from a new messages notice, as well as to add a "diff" that allows users to see what is changed.

See also