Jimbo is on a rampage again

Via Making Light and Fanwank I see that Jimbo Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has gone on one of his periodic rampages, deleting everything that could be construed as pornographic images, after catching some (predictable) flak from Faux News:

It began in early April, when Larry Sanger, arguably co-founder of Wikipedia, announces that he Reported Wikipedia to the FBI, alleging some of the hosted images violated the law.

There was brief discussion of this, but not much happened until this week, when Jimbo Wales decided to make it policy to purge some content from Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia’s image host. Jimbo Wales isn’t actually in charge of Wikipedia anymore, but he states that the Foundation will be issuing a statement shortly. It includes the wonderfully double-think line,

Although there is a common saying that “Wikimedia Commons is not censored,” this statement should not be interpreted to imply that we do not make editorial judgments about the appropriateness of content. We do, all the time, and we must.

And continues to him saying that “explicit sexual content and other imagery without serious merit [must be] deleted.”

Admins are concerned about this, and begin editing the proposal, trying to make it into a workable policy. Eventually, it’s edited into a policy with fairly widespread support, which excludes non-photographic works, allows works of historical, artistic, or other merit, and so on.

…And that’s when Jimbo begins deleting 19th century artworks, diagrams and sketches meant to explain sexual acts, and so on. When Wikipedia has a bot which automatically removes all uses of a file when it’s deleted, making it extremely hard to put files back.

It is not the first time Jimbo has gone on an unilateral delete spree, dictating content and policy from on-high, bypassing the normal channels for dispute resolution. Two examples I myself was (briefly) involved with were the blanking of the article on John Byrne when Byrne complained about it and the difficulties with Giovanni Di Stefano, who seemed to have pressured Jimbo to wipe away perfectly uncontroversial accusations against him. Both cases were lowkey enough that Jimbo got away with his dictatorial behaviour, but with this he seemed to have bitten off more than he can chew; there’s now a proposal put forth to take away much of his powers. This can only be a good thing, as a international, volunteer driven, “open source” project like Wikipedia should not be hampered by the whims and fears of one man.