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The Sausage Factory and the Sausage Fest
From Wikitruth
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[edit] Strap yourselves in for a story
There was a time when it was shocking that girls used computers. Computers were what boys used. The very idea that a girl would be operating a computer in a fashion other than trying to hit it and force the coins to come out was really mind-blowing.
And the idea that the kind of girls who would use computers in a normal, computer-ish manner were not just simply boys stuck in the wrong, ill-fitting body was also a slam to the system. No way, any normal user of computers would gag out between bites of their sandwich, there's no way that she's pretty, man. She's a pony.
And the idea that they might be girls, and girls with a sexual expressiveness, and be beautiful... Heck, it was a slack-jawed stunner. You'd actually have to pick your bag of doritos off the floor because you'd have dropped them in the realization that this girl-on-the-computer-who-is-really-a-girl would be pretty, like computers, and again, really be a girl.
Yes, there was a time when this was the case.
Then again, it was also 1985. Movies like Weird Science, with two okay-looking guys crossing a few wires on their home computer and finding an absolute babe come shooting the fuck out of their 15" monitor to an Oingo Boingo soundtrack... well, that was considered to be in the realm of science fiction fantasy. And not just because of the whole monitor thing, either. Pretty girls, man, they just didn't happen back then. They walked down runways and sat in the passenger seat of sports cars and they never ever let you see their tits.
Most of us got the memo that in the 20 years hence, girls have started to use the computer, and some of them have been quite pretty, and others have been pretty and sexually expressive and maybe once in a while got the fun idea of snapping a picture of their yam-yams and putting it online.
But apparently Wikipedia didn't get the memo.
Wikipedia has a wide variety of enjoyable articles of a sexual nature. Without the watchful eye of Wikipedia, an entire generation of schoolchildren would have no group-edited, cobbled together descriptions of Fisting, The Donkey Punch, Anal beads, Genital jewelry, Lolicon, and a thousand other subjects of delightful perversions and picadilloes.
As described elsewhere on this site, Wikipedia sees no major difference between children and adults in terms of browsers on Wikipedia. However, blocking access to Wikipedia because some aspects might be inappropriate for kids, and locking away all the rest of that helpful information, is tantamount to making them eat lead paint chips as far as Jimbo's concerned. Stave a child off from their educational materials regarding the age of consent everywhere on Earth and that's one child left behind. Or bare behind, we're not sure which.
Anyway, so girls.
Since Wikipedia is basically a massive department store of sex materials, big kudos come to everyone who takes time to upload photographs, illustrations and diagrams to accompany these articles. Certainly you wouldn't really understand the concept of the "dildo" if you didn't have a gold-plated dildo photo to make people understand: these things can be gold-plated!! Similarly, how else would you get across the concept of the penis without a nice galactic-size-shot of a wang to help people understand... these things get hard!!
Earlier this year, during the summer, a user started uploading photography to Wikipedia. In these photographs was a girl. By some standards, a rather pretty girl, with nice curves, friendly eyes, and in a couple photos, a nice ol' spray of manthrax across her face and chest.
The girl identified herself as "publicgirluk", and uploaded photos of herself in spandex, a sexy dress, and generally wearing very little, or nothing. She then started assigning the photographs to the appropriate places: the spandexed photo in Spandex fetishism, the latex-wearing photo in Latex clothing, and of course the jizz-riffic photo into Facial (sexuality). Publicgirluk also liked to edit articles of a sexual nature, working on the language and shoring stuff up. She even took a break from the sex articles a couple times and edited information about the Concorde, adding history of this supersonic cross-oceaning phallus and its development models.
So speaking of supersonic development of phalluses, publicgirluk was naturally taken on all sides by the usual range of holy crap there be women types, and handled it as well as most people do; ignoring them or otherwise correcting the assumptions that she was a porn star, or looking for love, or that she wasn't who she said she was.
A lot of her editing took place across July of 2006.
In late August of 2006, the Spandex hit the fan.
A "debate" arose regarding publicgirluk's uploading of photographs in which it was clearly obvious she had tits. The debate is still archived around, but we'll summarize as best we can, giving you the porn version, as it were.
Quarl opened the discussion with the usual hand-waving vague-ness. "PublicgirlUK has uploaded a number of sexually-explicit pictures of (supposedly) herself, mostly used in relevant articles. Wikipedia isn't censored, and the user seems well-intentioned, but there's something wrong about having a significant fraction of sexually-explicit images be of a single identifiable person..."
jpgordon burbled, "Wikipedia's not censored, no, but Wikipedia isn't a porn site either. I'm no prude, but this sure tests my limits."
And what of the legal responsibility of Wikipedia and whether publicgirluk was who she said she was, mused Moshe Constantine Hassan Al-Silverburg. "Is there any way that we can be sure that this user is really the person in these photographs? I could forsee some potential legal difficulty for wikipedia if this person isn't who we think it is. Is this a non-issue or does anyone see what I am talking about?"
[edit] Raging like a red rocket aimed at the sky
The commentary piled on and on. Concerns about Wikipedia being blocked from schools because of this. Concern that the girl was identifiable. Concern the Wikimedia Foundation might be liable for the publishing of these photos without proper documentation. Oh yes, concern was there, heaped upon publicgirluk... buckets of white, creamy discussion about all aspects of what these handful of photos represented in the sum-cum total of Wikipedia's existence.
Too bad it took hours to let publicgirluk know about it.
Meanwhile, we think this great insight sums up the quality of debate that Wikipedians could handle once a girl showed up:
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How often do you get such a glorious soup of paranoia, geeky references to bettor's squares, insulting commentary on a user's motivations, and decision that a jizz photo was "high stakes" in the context of Wikipedia? You go, Geogre.
Naturally, we could expect Wikipedia Admins to handle this whole situation tastefully and properly. And so they did:
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Do the dance, little tit-monkey. Do the dance.
[edit] The Money Shot
None of this is all out of the ordinary for Wikipedia, of course: people will argue how many bristles are in the brush of an ass-scrubber, and quote pseudo-legal jargon at each other until the sun goes "pfft". What makes this interesting is the injection of Jimbo's hot, sticky opinion into the mess.
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Based on Jimbo's word, and decision that there's just no way this could really be the girl and there was no way a girl would ever post pictures of herself like this on Wikipedia, the following actions were taken:
- Publicgirluk's photos were immediately deleted.
- Publicgirluk was banned from editing on Wikipedia.
So much for process. So much for discussion. The King spoke, and that was that.
Naturally, people have raised some amount of holy hell for how Jimbo just walked in and dick-slapped the proceedings, but that's not really their place. Once the decision's made, that's that.
Ironically, Publicgirluk herself spoke and said that if people didn't trust she was who she was, and that she was underage or an aardvark or whatever, then fine: delete the photos. At that point, it was pointed out that her photos were GFDL and she had no right to delete them:
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Thanks for the lesson, Cyde: You don't trust her photos, but then if she wants to remove them, she can't. Later, of course, Cyde claimed he was talking about her text and not her photos, since they weren't sourced, but this is weaseling; what he means is that if she had been able to prove she was the owner of the photos (by, oh, say, holding up a sign at Cyde's request), then she could never have them deleted.
[edit] One Last Spurt
In a rare display, we're going to let someone else speak: publicgirluk. We contacted her and got her permission to put up these photos, and we think what she said at the end of the "discussion" on Wikipedia captures it best:
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You go, girl.
[edit] Sources and sexy
- http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=prev&oldid=72838894
- "Sexual images spark debate" - by Ral315, Wikipedia Signpost, September 5 2006.
