Wales gives up censorship privileges.
Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales has given up some of his site privileges after people fumed that he deleted pictures claiming that they were pornographic.
According to the BBC, the move followed a complaint about "child pornography" to the FBI from another Wikipedia co-founder. Fox News also started a campaign against porn on the website and threatened to talk to the outfit's donors.
It seems that Wales suddenly saw the censorship light and ordered his tight little clique of so called "editors" to do their magic on the site and purge it of porn.
Administrators of Wikimedia Commons, a media file store widely used for Wikipedia articles, deleted hundreds of images.
However, like many decisions to make things disappear from the site, it appears that Wales and his editors got a bit carried away and purged shedloads of educational stuff that was not pornography.
Wales had made a big thing about deleting "images that are of little or no educational value but which appeal solely to prurient interests." He apparently deleted many pictures himself.
However that seems to have miffed a small band of volunteers who felt that Wales' move was a little autocratic and taken too quickly.
In response, Jimmy Wales voluntarily revoked many of the permissions given to him as Wikipedia's founder, to delete and edit protected content on Wikimedia Commons.
In a message to the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list, he said this was "in the interest of encouraging this discussion to be about real philosophical/content issues, rather than be about me and how quickly I acted."
We guess it also means that he will not be able to censor the entries of women he has dated and makes his tirade look a bit dumb.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012