Occasionally, we touch on Wikipedia’s insane, toxic culture because it’s basically the tech version of a reality show at this point, and people deserve to know just who is deciding that what you’re reading on the site is “notable.” And this is apparently the season where they pull out all the stops, because somebody just paid an artist who uses his penis as a brush named “Pricasso” to paint Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.
Essentially, a user named Russavia is teed off at Wales, because Wales, perhaps not unreasonably, finds it a bit objectionable that his beloved Wikimedia Foundation has been pulling double duty as a massive archive of dongs.
Reports the Daily Dot:
At its most basic, the Commons is a media repository, a place to store just about any photograph or video with a free license found on the Internet—media that can in turn be used to populate Wikipedia or any other Wikimedia site.
Thanks to the obsessive devotion of its contributors, the Commons hosts thousands of media collections that would make a museum proud, from World War II photography and early color photography to voluminous, high-res collections of classic art.
…
More controversially, the Commons hosts thousands of sexually graphic videos and images: penises, masturbation (including one shot with a Fleshlight), vulvas, ejaculation (both male and female), santorum, graphic visualizations of Bukkake, and so on.
Wales has attempted to address this problem before, only for it to result in his being shouted down by his fellow Wikipedia editors and his voluntarily giving up any control of Wikimedia Commons after trying to delete all the embarrassing photos.
Wales is not just a prude: there’s a serious concern that the subjects of these images might not know that they’re being posted all over the Internet. The Wikimedia Commons team has offered, at best, very thin justification for keeping every boob photo it finds and little concern for the rights of the subjects. In other words, they’re acting exactly as you’d expect.
Despite the fact that Wales has no control over the Wikimedia Commons, it still annoys Russavia that Jimmy Wales doesn’t understand why all these dick pics are so important. Hence, he hired a man who wears a pink Speedo and cowboy hat, and calls himself Pricasso, to paint an image of Wales with his penis. And then he posted both a photo of the painting and a video of Pricasso, ah, applying some brush strokes. Aren’t you glad one of the most trusted sites on the Internet is operated by people like this?