Content Policy Discussion

This thread is about our content policy. Your questions, complaints and suggestions about the content policy go here.

Our article on our Content Policy can be found here.

This post contains the original, longer version of the introduction of this thread.

Before you post here, we expect you to read the post about this in General Announcements, as well as at least the first post in this thread to get a clue about what is going on. If your question or complaint is already addressed in either of those, don't be surprised if we respond with just a link or a quote.

If you have questions or complaints or suggestions after reading the announcement, this is the place where you can ask them.

Resolved threads go to the Content Violations morgue.

Edited by MacronNotes on Apr 26th 2023 at 3:04:29 PM

The purging of pedo-related materials I fully understand, my definition of pedophilia and pedo-pandering is probably much stricter than that of most people here, but I understand and appreciate the general movement.

The purging of so-called pornographic material I view much more negatively. While I agree there should be some common-sense limits, said limits should be extremely minimal. Sexual material is part of fiction as much as anything else, and if we have a "no explicit material" policy, we're hamstringing this wiki's purpose.

edited 21st Aug '12 7:07:29 AM by TroperOnAStickV2

As per the explanation posts, we don't have a no "explicit material" policy - we have a no "porn" policy. One of the jobs of 5P is to determine if a work falls into the former or the latter category.

edited 21st Aug '12 7:17:23 AM by Pyrite

Quote from the announcement:

I seem to recall that I mentioned this announcement in the OP. I'm almost sure that I requested that people please read it before posting here.

The announcement makes it quite clear that we're removing porn, not anything with sex in it.

Ninja'd.

The OP is to be edited, so I'm preserving the original here:

This thread is about our content policy. Your questions, complaints and suggestions about the content policy go here.

The main thread for this discussion was locked when it had gone in circles for dozens of pages. There were other, parallel threads about this policy change, and they, too, had the same problem. Instead of reading up on the issue, people panicked and started posting about Orwell and Armageddon. The policy and the administration were strawmanned and people with differing views on what we should allow were taking pot shots at each other instead of having a polite discussion. This got the threads locked, and as a result we were left in a rather unfortunate situation where we didn't have any channel open for this discussion.

As with any other thread, we expect civility here. Mere bitching or personal attacks on the P5 or the administration will be thumped - just because we're the staff doesn't mean that you get to say things that we wouldn't tolerate you saying about other users. We will listen to criticism that is polite and reasonable. Keep that in mind.

Before you post here, we expect you to read the post about this in General Announcements, as well as at least the first post in this thread to get a clue about what is going on. If your question or complaint is already addressed in either of those, don't be surprised if we respond with just a link or a quote.

There is a degree of frustration in the staff at the way this discussion has gone before, as you can clearly see from my description of the previous threads. This is because we read literally over a hundred pages of the earlier discussions before they were closed, and all the content in them would have taken less than 10 pages if there had been no repetition resulting from people posting without reading up on the info we had available by then. I'm sure that you'll understand, then, why I implore you again to read the announcement before you post here. You might not like having to read a long-ish post without a summary, but you must understand that the post is itself a summary, and it is intended to address a host of predictable questions and complains. Sometimes things aren't simple, so you'll just have to read the announcement before posting.

If you have questions or complaints or suggestions after reading the announcement, this is the place where you can ask them.

edited 16th Jan '13 7:24:20 AM by BestOf

The P5 panel has done a very good job so far at making a distinction between pornography and stuff that merely has some explicit material. I would not be concerned that there will be a ban on all discussion of sexual material on this wiki. Just be sure you are doing so in a mature and professional manner, because we also have a policy against writing our articles in a lewd manner.

Anyway, I have a question:

Supposing that our article on an entire book series has been cut because one or more books within that series had objectionable content.

Would we be allowed to make a page on individual books in that series if we were to read that book and determine that the specific book did not have the type content that caused concerns about the series as a a whole?

edited 21st Aug '12 8:59:53 AM by Catbert

I don't see any reason why not (Sengoku Rance and Rance Quest both outlived the Franchise page) although it does raise some issues:

(1) We going to need a way prevent people from creating pages on the books with problematic contents.

(2) This mean that I and my colleagues are going to have to go through all of them as individual works rather than as a whole. Obviously this is going to increase turnaround.

Concerning (1): Locking the titles of the not allowed work pages could be a try.

A question: Can this thread be used for requesting minor (i.e not policy changes or bigger changes) in the GA post?

Like 'the wording of X is casing confusion can we change it to Y?'

^Yes.

We're entirely open to constructive criticism and suggestions here. Clarification of wording is one of those things.

Edit: I just got Arha's welcome PM. That's unsettling, even though I should have known it was coming.

edited 21st Aug '12 11:45:19 AM by Fighteer

Thanks. Here we go, bear in mind that some requests are based on my experience in CVD discussions and might not reflect the actual policy well:

• In the first paragraph, we will no longer be hosting trope examples seems to be jumping the gun a bit - AFAIK, we haven't decided yet on the fate of trope examples except for the obviously problematic ones.
• I am sure we decided to scrap the "p(a)edoshit" term due to the inflammatory nature in favour of the much clearer "pedo-pandering".
• Under "So what is actually happening, and why?", is guro singled out for a specific reason (like pedophilia) or is it treated like any explicit content?
• The section under "What can I do to help clean the site?" contains a few outdated things; I'd suggest to strike the entire section "You can also..." and replace it with the following:
  You should also leave a summary of your flagging reasons (including explaining the locations of the objectionable content) either in this thread or the article's discussion page to make the investigation easier.
• The "I still have some questions/concerns." section could use a link to this thread.

edited 21st Aug '12 11:59:39 AM by SeptimusHeap

Actually, with the advent of this thread, it might be a good time to implement the "Leave a reason or be zapped" idea we have been tossing around.

That's not very nice, Fighteer.

It'll be especially valuable now that we're running out of things to review. Okay, not especially valuable since when we were overloaded actual information would have helped, but it'll still he useful now. Namely, any further flaggings if they have that reasoning attached would thus be resolvable that much more quickly. When the forum runs out of stuff to do a lot of the people are going to disappear to the ability to review things is really going to decline apart from personal P5 member reviewing. That's not very practical in the case of something like a thousand page novel with no indication that the objectionable scene occurs at the 99% mark and consists of about a page and a half.

Also support the idea of tying flags to explanations on the discussion pages or the forum threads, and flag zaps if these aren't provided. This should make the job of the 5P easier and reduce the amount of misclick/troll flags.

@Arha: I meant that I'm not used to the post-and-instant-PM thing. It creeps me out, especially as I've posted here before. Not the content.

He's just teasing ya, Fighteer.

Guro is singled out as it's sexualized violence and not what most people immediately think of when they think of porn. Most people have a much more vanilla thought process and might not realise that it counts. For most people it's just some blanket gross thing.

I put Guro down in the requirements because I was trying to encapsulate the kind of horrific shock violence that might as well be pornography, but for a different crowd. Snuff films and the like.

So, basically guro there stands for "porn, but with sexualized violence instead of sexualized sex". Well, that is a good explanation.

Exactly. That's the point of guro.

So just to clarify, we're not talking about things like Hostel and other entrants in the "Torture Porn" genre?

No. Sexualized things is what we are talking about.

To be clear - I know I should know by now, but violence in media is something that makes me universally squeamish - there are sexual elements in the Hostel series, but the qualifier is that the violence, combined with sexual elements, is meant to titillate, not for catharsis?

EDIT: Just got the welcome PM, which is wholly ironic, since I've been here since the beginning of it. XD

edited 21st Aug '12 3:12:17 PM by LargoQuagmire

Just to toss a random example out, Guro would refer more to things like Mai-Chan's Daily Life and other things by that author?