Porn on Wikipedia

Ever have one of those moments when you realize you're dumber than you thought you were? Yup. I just had one. Ignorance is bliss and all that? Yup.

Apparently Wikipedia has porn. And not just "normal" porn. Some pretty ... how shall I say? specific? sub-sub-sub genres. Did I spend all morning searching this out? Nope. Slashdot has a story about the Wikipedia Board delaying their installation of a content filter. (Quick definition Content Filter: A piece of software which would run on Wikipedia's servers to examine all uploaded content to determine if they were pornographic in nature or violate Copyright. If the uploaded content matches any of those then the upload would be prohibited; or, maybe just flagged for review by someone else. The content in question would include images, videos, articles, and audio files.)

Now, I think that the Wikimedia Board and Foundation do great things. They don't accept advertisements, which means that they don't have a bunch of money. Designing, testing, and implementing a system such as this is quite expensive. Even just buying one "off the shelf" would be quite a project.

• Think of this from the perspective of a software vendor: If you had a small software company that made a product like this, all you'd have to do is make a tax deductible donation to the Wikimedia foundation of a copy of your software along with a few thousand dollars worth of servers to run it on. Then, you could walk into any potential customer and say, "We do this for Wikipedia. You will throw nothing at us that we haven't seen before." It'd be very easy selling for your company from here on out. Any company in this space with a good product would be dumb not to do this. No company has done this yet. Therefore, no one has a good product. Therefore, this must be an incredibly hard problem to solve.

Larry Sanger's article about this is fascinating to me. He's got the examples of why this type of Content Filter may be required. For the many years that I've been using (and contributing to) Wikipedia, I've always assumed it was safe. I figured there was an article on "Sex" with nice, clinical information. I had no idea what was all out there.

• Who's Larry Sanger? It appears that he's a co-founder of Wikipedia.