June 12, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – With over 65 million visitors per month, Wikipedia has been established worldwide as a leading information resource. But is its popularity due to its historical and scientific data?
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger warns that one of the site’s primary uses is actually for viewing pornography, and despite the outcry for content filters, none have been implemented.
“Wikipedia really faces an existential kind of question,” Sanger told LifeSiteNews. “Do they want to be an adults-only website, or one that continues to welcome children?”
-520x9999.jpg)
A survey of 176,000 Wikipedia readers and contributors in 2010 revealed that as many as 25% of users are under 18 years old. According to Fox News, Wikipedia is used every day by millions of children doing research for school.
So just how much porn are children viewing?
“Wikipedia features some of the most disgusting sorts of porn you can imagine,” Sanger states in a blog post on his website, “while being heavily used by children.”
According to Wikipedia traffic statistics, the majority of the site’s most frequently viewed pages are explicitly pornographic.
Sanger has also warned that porn comes up automatically on some searches, even if the search topics are apparently unrelated. For example, a search for “clothespins” or “jumping ball” reveals explicit sexual images.
Sanger urged the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to design and install a filter that would protect children from viewing this kind of imagery. An opt-in filter on Wikipedia—to hide certain content behind a warning—had been approved by the Foundation’s Board in 2011, but WMF and its project communities never completed the filter because of a “period of community reaction.”
Sanger’s criticisms are sometimes dismissed because he has a history of friction with Wikipedia. After launching the site with co-founder Jimmy Wales in 2001, Sanger left and set up a rival website, with garnered little popularity. Later he tried, unsuccessfully, to charge Wikipedia for distributing child porn.
Sanger says that he does not want the pornography issue to be about him, but simply wants to make Wikipedia “more responsibly managed and more useful for children.”
“I and others will continue to raise enough noise on the issue that we will, I hope, force them to make a choice,” he told LifeSiteNews. “Either they will explain very clearly that they are not for children, or, alternatively, they will install a filter.”