Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Ewlyahoocom/WikiPorn

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellany page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep, as no consensus. Closing comments: This really should have been taken to the policy level for wider community input, since this effort may be used to set standards by setting a precedent, as well as drawing one from the /Work Gallery AfD which I somewhat controversially closed as delete. This goes outside the scope of discussion of miscellany entries for deletion in this case, since the userspace and webspace usage prohibition guideline/policy are too vague on this issue. I note that John Reid had created Wikipedia:Galleries five hours before this AfD was listed, so five days later (well, actually less than four, but who isn't counting?), I am directing your attention to its pertinent Wikipedia:Gallery#Userspace_galleries section. P.S. And don't you even dare think of touching User:Kitty!! El_C 09:15, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Userspace porn galleries

Due to their nearly-identical nature and a recent MfD deletion of a similar page (see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Kingstonjr/Work Gallery) I would like to nominate the following together:

1. User:Ewlyahoocom/WikiPorn
2. User talk:Seingalt (note: never actually used as a talk page, and user has left over a year ago)
3. User:The Honorable/Test (removed per User:The Honorable's removal of the material anyway as he commented below--Konst.able 07:12, 14 October 2006 (UTC))
4. User:Markaci/Nudity
5. User:Cyde/Weird pictures

For the same reasons as the Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/User:Kingstonjr/Work Gallery MfD. To summarize the reasons for those who don't want to read through the thing (just citing some points that have been brought up, only one or two of them by me):

• Unecyclopaedic
• WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not censored is intended for articles and for encyclopaedic value, as the text itself indicates.
• Frequent copyright violations among these images, costing a lot of time to investigate and clean up.
• These galleries are not organised in any way to make them useful apart from being porn galleries. Categorised galleries are available on Wikicommons.
• User:Kingstonjr/Work Gallery was actually Wikipedia's second most frequently visited userspace page with User:Markaci/Nudity being first. Both with over 3000 hits per day.
• Violation of WP:USER per "Your page is about you as a Wikipedian."
• Violation of Wikipedia is not a free host
• Even if it does not techincally break any strong rules it is not helpful to building an encyclopaedia.

So that's a delete from me as nominator.--Konst.able 10:18, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete all for the same reason I gave in the last MfD: although they don't break any of the rules of WP:USER per se, they also don't help build the encyclopedia in any way and Wikipedia is not a free host. Yomangani^talk 10:33, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete all. These go outside whatuserpages are for. I'm not sure this MfD will be accepted as meaningful, but if it is, I fully support it. --Improv 14:42, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete, none of this helps in building the encyclopedia. >Radiant< 14:59, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete all per Konstable and per Yomangani, unless a user shows how his page or subpage is in current use supporting article creation in ways that couldn't be done with links to Wikicommons. Barno 17:43, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
• This is an utterly useless crusade against pornography dressed up in the guise of getting rid of "unencyclopedic content". I can point to thousands of user subpages that have much less to do with writing the encyclopedia than galleries of images, because, believe it or not, images are used in the encyclopedia, and it's useful to have a lot of the same type in the same place. If you have a problem with the images themselves then try to get them deleted, but trying to delete mere image galleries hanging out in userspace is not a worthwhile endeavor. Believe it or not, I have actually used these galleries to find images to use on articles. Some certain fetish article needs an appropriate photo? Oh, well I know some good places to go that are likely to have it. It's much better than trying to sort through the entirety of images on Wikipedia. --Cyde Weys 18:12, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

  Whether there are worse things in userspace or not is no excuse to keep these. It is not a "crusade" for censorship, as the images themselves are not being questioned, neither is the censorship of Wikipedia. Hence nomination of these galleries for deletion rather than images. Don't accuse people of hidden agendas - assume good faith man.--Konst.able 00:15, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

  Cyde, I assure you that that's not the case for me. I support explicit images on Wikipedia when they fit into articles -- you can check my participation in discussions on that in the past. I further think that porn is quite healthy and normal. I support deletion because I think that Wikipedia userpages are not the place for porn collections to be housed. --Improv 02:51, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

  Please see Wikipedia:Tendentious editing#Characteristics of problem editors, specifically "You find that nobody will assume good faith, no matter how often you remind them to" and "You often find yourself accusing or suspecting other editors of "suppressing information", "censorship"...". Were your images in the article Bondage (BDSM), etc, they would be appropriate, however what purpose could they possibly serve where they are except as a (primarily) porn gallery, with emphasis on bondage and buttocks? You don't seem to be using the space to develop a rewrite of Bondage, Pornography, or any other article. In short, get a host site for this stuff. KillerChihuahua^?!? 10:01, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment: We got rid of Category:Images containing nudity a while back, and Cyde makes some good points about browsing for images, but it stretches incredulity to assume that 3000 editors are looking for images for fetish articles each month (not per day, if I'm reading that link right). Also, we probably ought to include Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedians against censorship/Gallery and User talk:Hanby in this discussion (the latter seems to make explicit claims to being designed to get around filtering software). -- nae'blis 21:32, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment Does somebody else see the irony of people attempting to delete a gallery with explicit images on the wikikiproject against censorship? Wikipedia is WP:NOT censored... but let's remove the explicit images we do not like using other reasons. It's not censorship if the files are still there, but people can't find them. Yeah. CharonX/talk 22:17, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep For the same reasons I gave for User:Kingstonjr/Work Gallery - does not violate an rules (including WP:POINT), the statement that the pages are high-traffic pages comes from a page that explicitely says it is in beta stadium and not necessarily reliable (interesting enough last month's statistics for userspace had exactly three entries - and I believe we have more than 3 userspace pages), and that WP:NOT does not say it is resticted to article space, with userpace usually cutting users even more slack. My personal guess is that after those galleries are deleted Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedians against censorship will soon follow. CharonX/talk 21:45, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

  Charon, no one has ever said anything about censoring Wikipedia or opposing that WikiProject. But these userspace galleries are quite unrelated to building Wikipedia. I have seen people have some smaller versions of the galleries above, featuring just their own uploads - I did not nominate those for deletion as I see nothing wrong with someone showing off their own work. But these galleries above are just random unorganised collections of all the nudity they can find, which serves no purpose and is on the verge of turning Userspace into a personal web host or something like MySpace. The legitimate images on these pages will not be deleted, nor will they be made any less accessible - as most of them are all nicely organised on commons (the existence of which no one is arguing about here)--Konst.able 00:10, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

• I'd like to apologize for mine -- I've been using User:The Honorable/Test as a sandbox, and wasn't intending to create any sort of permanent gallery, like Kingstonjr and Markaci. The Honorable 00:31, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. From my understanding, the nomination is to delete the userpages, not the images on them. Therefore, I don't buy any argument that deletion is censorship. I do accept the reasons given by the nominator; in particular, that this is not supposed to be a free hosting service. I don't see how having these promotes the purpose of building an encyclopedia or lets us know anything about the users as wikipedians. As for being a useful repository of images, if a user really needs to have something "handy" their userpage can have a link to the appropriate commons page (much like many users have links to frequently used tools). Agent 86 02:00, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment What is the difference between deleting the images and deleting the galleries with the images? If the images are deleted they cannot be viewed, if all gallery links are deleted the images cannot be found - and thus cannot be viewed. So, the outcome is the same, the images are made unavailable to the common user, may it be that he just want to look at naked bodies or that he looks for a fitting image for an article. I call this censorship. Also see above the call for deleting the gallery on the wikiproject AGAINST censorship, which is ironic and disturbing at the same time. CharonX/talk 12:10, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
    • No, the images can be viewed if these particular galleries are deleted. These images are available on commons (and there are numerous galleries there) and in articles to which they belong.--Konst.able

*Delete - I have no real objections regarding the presence of nudity and/or explicit material per se in wikipedia, if there is a reasonable and justifiable reason for their presence. However, I cannot see that a user simply wanting to group together a number of them for personal entertainment qualifies as such. And, personally, I would like to see at least some of them in articles. The "Breasts not Bombs" image from Cyde's gallery certainly strikes me as one that could legitimately be placed in some article and would I think genuinely add something to an article to which it is appropriate. Also, User:CharonX's arguments that deleting the userpage means that the images cannot be viewed is bordering on ridiculous, as it implies, if not explicitly states, that images in Wikipedia:Commons are impossible to find. Certainly, anyone wishing to view these images could simply make a collection of links to them, which I believe is permitted by guidelines. I would also like to let everyone know that someone much better at this sort of thing than I am has made a proposal for a guideline regarding galleries at Wikipedia:Galleries. As I understand proposed guidelines (which is to say, poorly), that may well be the appropriate place for more generalized discussion of this subject. Badbilltucker 15:20, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete per Radiant.Voice-of-All 16:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. These galleries serve virtually no purpose except to be free porn galleries. The Land 18:55, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. Concur with Cyde. Additionally, I believe this is a poorly disguised land grab by folks who want to cleanse Wikipedia of nude images and things they find objectionable. There has not been a compelling argument yet that these pages are consuming bandwidth or space in any substantial amount. There has not been a persuasive argument yet that these pages violate WP:USER. The assertion that these pages do not help to build the encyclopedia rests on the false assumption that a collection of nude images is somehow less useful than, for example, a list of pages that users maintain for watching related changes. This assumption is only true for users who do not work on these sorts of articles. I am sure that if someone thinks board games are boring, he would find my WikiProject Board and table games watchlist equally useless. To understand the utility of a page like this, I have to assume good faith on the part of the users who edit the articles using these images. All that's left is "it's porn, delete it", and it is clearly not porn and should not be deleted. —ptk✰fgs 19:04, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
  • "I believe this is a poorly disguised land grab by folks who want to cleanse Wikipedia of nude images and things they find objectionable" excuse me? Let's not throw false accusations around and read: WP:AGF and WP:NPA.--Konst.able 21:47, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. I totally agree with ptk's argument. The reason to delete User:Kingstonjr/Work Gallery was "it's porn, delete it". From my point of view, many others pages are porn as for example http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Penis. Why do you propose to delete only User:Ewlyahoocom/WikiPorn, User talk:Seingalt, User:Markaci/Nudity, User:Cyde/Weird pictures and not all porn pages ? Safedom 21:38, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Read my already existing answer to Charon above.--Konst.able 21:49, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Comment: Ok for your answer but my question was related to many pages as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Penis. I confirm my point of view: if you decide to delete porn pages, you have to delete also such a page. Safedom 22:37, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
• Comment: I'm honoured to have created a page that received the most hits on the English Wikipedia (at least during the tool's beta stage), despite its obvious popular nature. I'm also lucky to have checked back at this time before it was deleted, though I knew it was inevitable. Take note that I do not view nudity as pornography, and that I view this "crusade" similar to other campaigns aimed to sanitize Wikipedia. The gallery, as I left it, did not have any fair use images -- any such images were listed underneath using wikilinks. User:Markaci/Nudity will be saved in wikiformat (Special:Export/User:Markaci/Nudity) and in HTML format by myself and by countless others. My contributions are in the public domain, and I encourage those who share my opinion to save, share, and recreate to your heart's content. —Mar·ka·ci 21:55, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep all. I wasn't aware that Kingstonjr's gallery was nominated for deletion, and would've recommended keeping that one as well. User:Markaci/Nudity is such a large collection of images related to nudity (not porn) on Wikipedia, that I refuse to accept nominator's speculation of it not being useful. Deleting them as "unencyclopedic" doesn't really work either, as I think many find userboxes ten times less encyclopedic than image galleries (unless the problem is the nudity). I would rather award Markaci a barnstar for his work than delete it. Prolog 22:52, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per VoA -- Tawker 23:08, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
• On why this is invalid — I'm getting lumped in with a bunch of porn galleries in this ridiculous MFD. I'm not making a porn gallery. I'm making a gallery of weird images that happens to not be censored. Other people have all sorts of random image galleries in their userspace; the only ones currently targeted for deletion are ones containing nudity. --Cyde Weys 23:18, 14 October 2006 (UTC)

I don't really care if they're pictures of Muppets or flowers or whatever. That's not the point, and crying censorship is simply a red herring. I will give you that not all the images on these galleries are porn and that the nominator probably used a loaded term in the title of this nomination, but if those other galleries that you speak of but don't identify were nominated, I'd probably say delete those too. Agent 86 02:07, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

• Strong Delete - wikipedia is not censored when uncensored pictures are useful to our goal of buildling an encyclopedia. Having porn gallaries under the banner of not censored is just gaming the system. And as per all the reasons listed per nom. --`/aksha 02:23, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment: What do you think about many pages really porn as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Penis. If you decide to delete porn pages, you have to delete also such a page. Safedom 22:37, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete or prune back to just a few images on each page this is a straightforward delete muddied by the issue of censorship. If these pages each contained a collection of jet fighter or Harley-Davidson photos, I think this would be a much shorter discussion with a consensus to delete any pages where the user did not trim the collection back to a handful of images. Here are the policies and guidelines; if we don't like them we should change them, but until then, this deletion process should note:
  • WP:NOT: "Wikipedia is not a blog, webspace provider, or social networking site"
  • WP:NOT: "Personal web pages. Wikipedians have their own user pages, but they may be used only to present information relevant to working on the encyclopedia. If you are looking to make a personal webpage or blog, please make use of one of the many free providers on the Internet. The focus of user pages should not be social networking, but rather providing a foundation for effective collaboration."
  • WP:NOT: "If you have extra relevant images, consider uploading them to the Wikimedia Commons, where they can be linked from Wikipedia."
  • WP:NOT: "Mere Collections of photographs or media files with no text to go with the articles."
  • WP:NOT#Wikipedia is not censored: "While obviously inappropriate content (such as an irrelevant link to a shock site) is usually removed immediately, some articles may include objectionable text, images, or links if they are relevant to the content"
    • Comment: More than 5 to 10 photos seems like overkill for any valid point these user pages might be trying to make
  • WP:NOT: "Wikipedia is free and open, but restricts both freedom and openness where they interfere with creating an encyclopedia. Accordingly, Wikipedia is not a forum for unregulated free speech."
  • WP:NOT: "The fact that Wikipedia is an open, self-governing project does not mean that any part of its purpose is to explore the viability of anarchic communities. Our purpose is to build an encyclopedia, not to test the limits of anarchism."
  • WP:USER: "Wikipedia is not a general hosting service, so your user page is not a personal homepage. Your page is about you as a Wikipedian"
  • WP:USER: "Generally, you should avoid substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to Wikipedia."
  • WP:POINT: "Gaming the system is the use of Wikipedia rules to thwart Wikipedia policy"

--A. B. 04:40, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Comment: Note that two of these collections, User:Ewlyahoocom/WikiPorn and User talk:Seingalt are much smaller than the other two, with fewer than two dozen images each; maybe that's OK. Ewlyahoocom and Cyde encourage others to add images, the other two do not; to some extent, this invitation makes those pages more blog-like than the other two. --A. B. 04:51, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

FYI, Seingalt, while inactive for a year on the English Wikipedia, is very active administrator on the Hungarian Wikipedia. I left him a message on his Hungarian talk page. --A. B. 05:18, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Comment: Is it really kosher to combine four different users' pages into one MfD? I'm starting to think that process-wise, maybe there should be at least 2 MfDs (one for the two big galleries and one for the two 20-image galleries) and preferably 4. Yes it's more work, but some of these user galleries present issues others don't:

1. Two are much smaller than the other two.

2. Two openly encourage others to add images, the other two do not.

3. For those keen on content/pornography issues, the content varies somewhat as well.

4. The gallery "objectives" vary also; Cyde, as he noted, is looking for weird, others are looking for "nude", still others for "wikiporn"

Personally, I think the only issues involve #1 and #2, but clearly some other participants also think #3 and #4 are relevant. --A. B. 05:42, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete all While Wikipedia is not censored, neither is it a free porn site. None of these pages are being used for writing or development of articles, and serve no encyclopedic purpose. KillerChihuahua^?!? 09:53, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep, more useful and helpful to the encyclopedia than your average userspace userbox. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 16:58, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
• Delete per various points made by KC and others. I have absolutely no aversion to porn, and anyone who knows my work here knows that I do not support censorship, but I don't think using Wiki as a hosting service for porn is appropriate. As for the userbox comment above -- were you kidding? •Jim62sch• 17:15, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Deleting these pages will not remove the images, and none of the images are solely around for these pages. Wikipedia isn't being used to host anything it wouldn't otherwise; it's simply being indexed in a different manner. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 17:39, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Exactly. There's nothing wrong with hosting these images, there would be nothing wrong with these pages if they were lists, the problem is with the galleries of images that do not appear to serve any real editorial value. Guettarda 18:15, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

A gallery's just a list with a quick visual reference? Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:19, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment - would retention of these pages as lists satisfy both sides? List provide most of the editorial utility, without being "porn galleries", not so? Guettarda 18:16, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

The value of the page is significantly increased by using a gallery instead of a list. Someone who is editing related articles and looking for relevant images can find them quickly by looking through a gallery, but must click click click click click click and open a zillion tabs (or whatever) to use a list for the same task. —ptk✰fgs 18:24, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

• Question What does User:Fir0002/Natures pics, or any other random collection of pictures selected by a user, add to the encyclopedia that this doesn't? That's a group of pictures of naked animals; these are groups of pictures of naked people. Night Gyr (talk/Oy) 18:21, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment: I agree. I don't understand this issue related to know if a group of pictures add or not something to the encyclopedia. We have to take into consideration all the pages, not only the user_galleries. You can find many porn pages as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Penis. I'm not sure that there is really an added value of so many pictures in this encyclopedia. Safedom 22:37, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
    • • Categories such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Penis serve a purpose in if you have an article that requires a picture of a penis you can find it. Likewise, a user gallery about flowers allows people to find images of flowers. A user gallery that is simply a collection of images the author considers "WikiPorn" serves no practical purpose. - DNewhall 22:54, 15 October 2006 (UTC)
• I don't feel it's fair to lump all these galleries into one MfD but since it's already been done...

1. User:Ewlyahoocom/WikiPorn - Delete, serves no purpose other than collecting "WikiPorn" which does not seem to have any practical value.
2. User talk:Seingalt - Delete per nom.
3. User:Markaci/Nudity - Keep, serves a legitimate use if someone needs an image dealing with nudity.
4. User:Cyde/Weird pictures - Delete, don't see how it has any encyclopedic value since it's entirely a collection of links the creators finds interesting.

While I don't really care one way or another about the galleries WikiPolicy seems to be quite clear on the matter (see also A. B.'s post). - DNewhall 22:42, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. To answer Safedom's objections ("If you decide to delete porn pages [user galleries], you have to delete also such a page as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Penis"), that logic is faulty. Categories such as that serve a purpose in if you have an article that requires a picture of a . The user galleries are collections of

Comment Common argument: Categories such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Penis serve a purpose in if you have an article that requires a picture of a penis you can find it. Do you think really that you need more than 50 pictures of penis to serve an article related to penis! I understand your point of view. If we decide to choose these criteria, we have to revisit many pages, not only user_galleries. Safedom 07:55, 16 October 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. Useful - David Gerard 11:48, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep 3 and 4, Delete 1 & 2. Sorry, I had myself lumped them all together initially, and agree being selective makes more sense. However, I have a real question about some of the pictures which are being added to some of the galleries lately, as they seem to be images which were just recently on the Kingstonjr gallery, and it seems (at least to me) that some individuals might be looking to keep them on wikipedia at any cost. Having said that, I would think one gallery of explicit (and potential litigation-inspiring[?]) collection of images at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Wikipedians against censorship/Gallery should be enough to satisfy the prurient interests of those who try to get around restrictions about viewing pornographic images at work by coming to wikipedia and viewing our collection of images, particularly as many seem to me to include a number of images whose practical utility for inclusion in articles is, at best, dubious. And I repeat that, in some cases, a collection of links, without the images, would serve the same practical purpose, at least for anyone really looking for images to add to articles. Better organization of Wikipedia Commons would achieve the same results, too. Having said all this, I hope that this is the last nomination for deletion of this type until we've all looked over and revised the guidelines at Wikipedia:Galleries, so that any gallery creators will know the ropes and be able to structure their galleries within wikipedia guidelines. Badbilltucker 13:33, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
• Keep all, I don't see any policy validity to deleting them, and it doesn't make common sense to do so. SchmuckyTheCat 15:53, 16 October 2006 (UTC)
• Strong delete all, "useful" is not a justification for being kept. In fact, it is often a sign that those trying to keep the galleries have no other justification left for their existance. These are all a violation of WP:NOT as they have no encyclopedic purpose, and thus should not exist. — Dark Shikari ^talk/_contribs 01:57, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Delete All Per WP:USER. Userpages should only be used for stuff that benefits the 'pedia, not as personal webhosting space Borisblue 02:37, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.