Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s widely acknowledged co-founder, has written a letter to the FBI arguing that Wikipedia, more specifically, the Wikimedia Commons project, knowingly hosts child pornography.

While Sanger’s relationship with Wikipedia and the Foundation in the past few years has become colder, to say the least, I can only wonder what prompted Sanger to rush into notifying the authorities without first a) inquiring whether or not the Foundation was aware of the existence of the offending images and b) actually verifying that said images could indeed be considered as child pornography.

The Register has followed up on the whole case, and it appears that the images may not be child pornography after all, as they “do not depict real people” (probably meaning that they were drawings or illustrations) and that Sanger subsequently acknowledged that the use of the term child pornography “may have been misleading”.

On the other hand, Sanger’s rationale for speculating that Wikimedia knew about the images is also rather light. He browsed the history and noticed that they had been there long enough for someone to have noticed. Now, if one were to believe the Wikipedia article on the Commons, the project hosts over six million files. Yeah, you read right, that’s six million pictures, videos and audio clips maintained by volunteer editors, an overwhelming majority of whom are not associated with the foundation.

Now, I don’t think Sanger had bad intentions when he did this, and, while I haven’t seen the images, I’m sure they must have been disturbing. Still, Sanger’s course of action leaves much to be desired. Not because of the fact that he probably created a public relations nightmare for the foundation but because he kinda made himself look like a fool. He should have written directly to the foundation (as opposed to directly to the FBI, his representatives and whoever else) asking them to a) verify his non-lawyer’s opinion and b) given them a sensible window of time to notify authorities themselves. He did not do this, I’m guessing, because he genuinely believed that the project’s official “management” —more specifically Wikimedia’s Deputy Director, Erik Möller— was behind it.

I understand why Sanger has become mistrustful of the Foundation and Jimbo, but to believe that they knowingly allowed the inclusion of (and thus supported) child pornography, is a bit too much.