kink.com deleted from wikipedia

by Violet Blue on December 3, 2008

kink.com deleted from wikipedia

This week Kink‘s article page was deleted from Wikipedia. Nope, don’t see any way in which an article about Kink.com would reflect a significant cultural contribution or be necessary for notable, externally verifiable inclusion in a worldwide encyclopedic reference. Neither would anyone else (nytimes.com), I’m sure.

Violet Blue

The London Times named Violet Blue "One of the 40 bloggers who really count" and Self Magazine named TinyNibbles one of the “Best Sex Resources for Women.” Blue is an autodidact and pundit on sex and technology, hacking and security, porn for women, privacy and bleeding-edge tech culture. She is a journalist for ZDNet, CBS News, CNET; she's an educator, speaker, crisis counselor, volunteer NGO trainer, and the author and editor of over 40 award-winning books.

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{ 11 comments }

1 Tony Comstock December 8, 2008 at 7:53 am
2 Tony Comstock December 6, 2008 at 11:34 am

@Marshall

Community content editing/flagging/etc is rife for vague standards, double-standards, no standards:

YouTube Removes “Bill & Desiree” Trailer for TOS Violation
http://tinyurl.com/6cjy6b

YouTube, Not MyTube (How hysteria-induced hypocrisy hurts all of us.)
http://tinyurl.com/6ysdzl

3 Marshall December 6, 2008 at 7:16 am

I cannot imagine what standard was applied in this situation. Although the entry could be cleaned up a bit, given the “wealth” of data about porn on Wikipedia, Kink.com is probably in the top 98% of notability and relevance. Another dumb day on the wiki.

4 lifedude December 5, 2008 at 1:12 pm

Looks like its back as of today. The history for the page shows…

05:39, 5 December 2008 Orangemike (Talk | contribs) (13,039 bytes) (problematic, but should not have been speedily deleted; my apologies) (undo)

5 Tony Comstock December 4, 2008 at 6:35 am

This is the new internet reality — wiki, flikr, youtube, etc – indexed and fully searchable, and beholden to most reactionary elements in our society. Of course offensive at sexual imagery and ideas has special standing. Say goodbye to participating in the culture at large.

6 anon December 3, 2008 at 7:20 pm

sigh.

read this across from a horrifically erotic depiction of suicide on the moving picture device.

oddly relevant and appropriate. doubly so given wales’s background.

only one fix is appropriate, but possibly nixed technically: git clone http://wikipedia.org/.

7 tim December 3, 2008 at 6:59 pm

Or as I like to used to say, “Wikipedia is the internet of the internet.”

I guess I’m not sure I can say it applies anymore.

8 CitizenJoe December 3, 2008 at 6:46 pm

wikipedia is getting to be too PC… but there are still a lot of good, objective sysops on there… best thing to do is re-create the page… the more info and knowledge on there, the better…

9 violet December 3, 2008 at 4:39 pm

even more upsetting to me is that Wikipedia is supposed to do what old encyclopedias didn’t and could not do — *include* everything someone might want to know about as a reference (unbiased) in the real world, and grow and breathe like a living thing (much like the Internet). the founder said,

“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.”

and juxtapose it with the person who deleted the kink.com page who prides himself on, and brags about being a ‘deletion king’. in this context, it’s not irony. it is the undoing of principle and vision.

10 MichaelK December 3, 2008 at 2:07 pm

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are far too many people “editing” on Wikipedia with power issues and the like. I don’t think Wikipedia is worth the wankery.

11 tim December 3, 2008 at 1:38 pm

This is particularly ironic since the person responsible for deleting it has his own reference page littered with links to Wikipedia pages which reference equally “insignificant” topics, as compared to Kink.com, such as:

ICon, GDH, Southern politics, Bacon number, Science fiction fandom, science fiction conventions, Society for Creative Anachronism, and a specific bookstore: Renaissance Books.

I’M not suggesting these topics are not notable enough to remain in Wikipedia, but it seems inconsistent to claim Kink.com is not culturally relevant enough to include, while Renaissance Books is.

In addition, why was kink.com deleted when other, very similar entries were not? These include pages such as Abbywinters.com, Beate Uhse AG, Bel Ami, Dill Media, Gwen Media, Hancock Studios, Naked Women’s Wrestling League.

Meanwhile, the kink.com page is still accessible via the Google cached page here:

http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:d446vRFTlSEJ:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kink.com+wikipedia+kink.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=safari

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