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Comment by Osiris | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I understand why the admins got so upset about it. If, in fact, Wikimedia Commons was hosting illegal images, why shouldn't the foundation take actions to ensure they were removed?

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Why do you make an assumption that these images are illegal? Photographs of genitalia are not necessarily pornography, much less illegal or obscene. The hysteria that Fox seems to be trying to whip up is that children in school might learn about sex.

Osiris didn't say the images were illegal - Osiris asked whether the foundation had a right/obligation to remove the images "if, in fact," they were illegal. Seems like no one can say, at this point, whether the images were or were not illegal, since that question has not been decided by a court.

To clear this up (and as I mentioned on the original article):

No, these images are not illegal.

IANAL - but I am one better, someone who grades such images for court.

[on the issue raised; clearly the foundation does have a right/obligation to remove illegal images. Indeed even if they suspect them to be illegal. However any expert they could have found would have told them they are fine. I think the uprising is more against the impression that the foundation has bowed to their sponsors rather than take a realist/rational approach]

He wasn't removing illegal images, he set out to remove anything that might make Wikipedia look bad to donors.

Wikipedia looking bad in the eyes of donors would be catastrophic considering the Wikimedia Foundation's sole source of revenue is donations.

Now, I am a self-professed idealist sometimes, but it strikes me that what would really be catastrophic would be an encyclopedia altering their content solely in response to a moral hysteria whipped up by a partisan media organization (regardless of their affiliation).

At least they're not allowing donors to change facts, like this "history" project is doing: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1502076070/mondo-2000-an... (check out the prizes on the right-hand side).

I thought the idea of getting donations instead of having ads was to avoid the theoretical possibility of altering the content. If indeed this is related to donor perception you might as well rely on ads, which are not certain to alter the content AND will make Wikimedia a financial powerhouse able to pursue multiple other projects.

Although I must confess that at this stage, the thought of Jimmy Wales commanding a billion dollar empire does not necessarily excite me.

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