Thaindian News

Washington, May 8 (ANI): Wikimedia, Wikipedia’s parent company, has started an online purging activity to get rid of sexually explicit content on the website following a report by an American TV news network.

The move followed a report by FoxNews.com, which asked a dozen donor companies, including Google, Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo!, Open Society Institute, Ford Foundation, Best Buy, USA Networks and Craigslist Foundation, if they were aware of the highly pornographic material that was present on the website.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia, is easily accessible to the scores of children across the world. The website could easily provide access to such pictures - including close-ups of genitalia and people having sex and masturbating. There’s even a “nude children” category.

“We have had a problem with images being placed into inappropriate categories, so that viewers were exposed in unexpected ways to sexual content. Image categorization should be done in such a way that readers are not exposed unexpectedly to content that may be offensive,” FoxNews.com quoted Jimmy Wales, the president of the Wikimedia Foundation, as writing in a post.

“I expect the board to issue a statement within a few days offering a general philosophical support for the serious enforcement of policy on this issue. The Board normally does not get involved with detailed content decisions; I don’t expect that to change,” he wrote elsewhere.

A report by FoxNews.com revealed that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger had sent a letter to the FBI regarding the pornographic material being posted on the website.

The FBI has not commented on whether it will pursue an investigation.

Although the purging process is in full flow, there are still pictures that are available on the website, marked for deletion.

Wales himself marked hundreds of images for deletion, all of which involved graphic images of sex acts. (ANI)