Adult Content Policy

This is official AboutUs Policy, adopted for the community by 93.75% YES of 32 ActiveMembers on 10 May 2007

Quick Links

Policy

After careful consideration of our values and a thorough study of related background information, we the members of the AboutUs community have decided the following:

Our website (www.aboutus.org) will not host or display AdultContent.
Some WikiPages on our website (www.aboutus.org) will describe or catalog other websites on the Internet that do host and display AdultContent. These pages will be designated as relating to adult content websites.
In order to reach a page designated as relating to adult content websites, visitors and community members will have to take some action which clearly demonstrates their intention to view such pages.
Members of the AboutUs community will be able to designate pages as relating to adult content using a simple flagging mechanism. There will also be a similar mechanism to reverse such designations.
This policy may be changed only by a statement that achieves higher participation and agreement than that used to ratify any earlier version of the policy.

Interpretation

A special exception is made for the titles of WikiPages that refer to existing domain names. Some websites that we will refer to on our WikiPages will have obscene domain names that we would normally excluded from our pages.
Adult images (including thumbnails) are not displayed on our pages
Wiki Pages that refer to pornographic sites will be tagged as RefersToAdultContent
Disturbingly graphic depictions of violence aren't displayed on our pages (if it were a movie, the content on our site needs to get a PG-13, PG, or G rating.)
Wiki Pages that refer to sites that contain graphic depictions of violence will be tagged as RefersToAdultContent

Implementation

The terms of service and other related policy documents will be updated to reflect the outcome of this process.
A CommunityFlagging drop down box on every page allows logged in users to flag pages as RefersToAdultContent.
Viewers must click through a warning page that clearly indicates what RefersToAdultContent means before viewing a page that contains the flag.
Logged in users may set their preferences to automatically skip the warning pages.
Flagged pages are not displayed in RecentChanges, the Presence Meters, RandomPage, or in any of the normal areas of the site.
To prevent unwanted associations, flagged pages will not be categorized or have related domains that cross the walled garden boundary.
- This is to prevent losing people who mind-wiped their presence on AboutUs because their domains got inadvertently linked with porn by the search engines.
- Also to prevent complaints about sites added to the "related domains" on some article that refers to an adult content site.
We will run a script to automatically flag most of the pages that refer to sites that contain adult content (it won't do a perfect job). After flagging the script will also remove category and related domain information, although users can add these later (as long as the links are to content inside the wall).
As we need to, we'll change the implementation to better implement the policy.
As we need to, we'll institute better policies using a method that honors the same principles that guided the development of the original policy.
The mechanism for getting over the wall (ie. logged in users only, verified real people only, no minors or the like) will need to be worked out in implementation planning after this policy has been ratified.

Examples

Here are some standard examples for images of what we allow and not allow. Feel free to add examples.

Michelangelo's David, etc = Acceptable.
Picture of one person nude = Not Acceptable.
Picture of extreme violence = Not Acceptable.
Artwork (statues, portraits, etc) for museum related page or similar = Acceptable.
Same gender groups, fully clothed = Acceptable