The Chosen One

A listener asks: whose penis gets the top spot on the Wikipedia page for penis? Our quest for an answer takes us on a surprisingly philosophical journey — where we learn about the cutthroat fight to be number one and the extremely overthink-y debate that precedes the coronation. Wikipedia page for Lane Rasberry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Bluerasberry. Wikipedia page for penis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis. Wikipedia page for human penis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_penis. Become a premium member! https://searchengine.supercast.com/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello, Search Engine listeners. We need your help. If you have visited Japan in the last few years as a tourist, we would like you to send us a 20-second voice memo explaining why you decided to go to Japan. Be specific if you can remember like what you went for, or what you wanted to see, or what you saw or heard that made you interested in Japan. Our address is [email protected]. Thanks, and here's our show this week. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Toyota. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel-drive Camry Corolla Cross

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  Toyota, let's go places.

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• 2:46Speaker 00

  Do you want to introduce yourself? Just say your name.

• 2:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm Leon. I live in San Francisco, originally from Amsterdam, moved here five years ago, and longtime listener of the show.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Leon had sent in a question, a good one, about something that it had never occurred to me to wonder about. Can you just tell me what your question was?

• 3:04Speaker 01

  My question basically distills down to who is the penis on Wikipedia? How did that picture get there? And who decides whether that picture gets up there?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  Like, because if you go to the Wikipedia page for penis, vagina, butthole, I mean, it's probably not butthole, it's probably anus. But like, the Wikipedia pages of various private parts have actual photographs of like, somebody's version.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I think the thing that got me to this question is, like, growing up in the early 2000s, my sexual education came from Wikipedia. And I think what made Wikipedia really compelling as a teenager is that every anatomy page had actual photos. You'd look at penis, you'd see a picture of penis, same for like nipples, same for vulva. And I kind of always took that for granted, but like, the thing I started wondering about recently is like, how do those pictures get there? Like, who are the people that upload a photo of their penis to Wikipedia? And then like, more importantly, who decides which penis becomes the Wikipedia penis? Like, is there a committee? Is there a rubric? Are there debates? And has that picture been the same for the last decade? Or are they still accepting new submissions?

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Like, PJ, could you and I upload a picture? Like, could I upload a picture of my penis today? And is there a chance that they'd be like, "Yeah, actually, that is a more average penis than the one that we currently have on the site." You know, "We're gonna accept it."

• 4:30Speaker 00

  It's funny, my whole life is set up to not end up naked on the internet. I can't imagine, not even for profit, but just for curiosity and experience, and perhaps to contribute to the knowledge of global commons there's some party. It's like, I kind of want to know how to slide my picture in the file.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes. For a lot of people, you know, like especially kids like me, growing up online, these pictures become their baseline understanding of what bodies are supposed to look like. When my gay ass looked at vulva as a teenager, like, that generally made from the first and last vagina I ever saw. So it's a question I really want answered.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  It's funny, you know, when I read your question in my inbox, I just enjoyed it because I enjoyed thinking about the people. Like, I never wondered what type of person wants their penis to be seen in a non-pornographic reference material context? And I never thought about, well, who makes that decision? But the idea of like, this being perhaps the most viewed penis in human history, the most viewed vagina in human history, the most viewed anus in human history, the most viewed breasts in human history.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Keep going.

• 5:39Speaker 00

  That's all the private parts I could think of. But like, everyone has to decide how they feel about their body. And part of the way you decide how you feel about your body is by looking at other bodies. Like, it is kind of an important penis.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:52Speaker 00

  Like, I kind of buy the theory of the question.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  I think what's more interesting, too, beyond the people, is the discussion underneath it, because Wikipedia editors take their work very seriously, right? So I refuse to believe there haven't been intense arguments between Wikipedia editors about which penis is the correct penis. So I'd be very curious to understand the actual like rubric and decision criteria as well.

• 6:21Speaker 00

  In my decades trying to answer questions and solve mysteries online, I've run into the Wikipedia gang a time or two. And I suspected Leon was right. In a world supported by the quiet work of conscientious overthinkers, these were some of the most overthinky.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  After a short break, the contest to become the world's most famous penis, and how a high council of internet librarians chooses a wiener.

• 7:30Speaker 00

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• 8:33Speaker 00

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• 9:48Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the show.

• 9:53Speaker 00

  Wikipedia, just the fact of its existence and survival, has always astonished me. But I never really knew the story of how it came to be. It turns out Wikipedia found its path, as many great things do, through trial and error. In 2000, a former options trader named Jimmy Wales wanted to start a kind of online encyclopedia. The idea, to make sure the information was accurate, was to only allow experts to write articles. Articles that would be vetted by an elaborate seven-step peer review process. A too elaborate peer review process. After 18 months, the website had about 20 articles. It wasn't really working. Wales and Larry Sanger, the person he'd hired to help run the site, went back to the drawing board.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  What if they kept the review process, kept the experts, but let normal civilians submit articles too? Their board of experts was extremely offended by this, absolutely not. And so a compromise was struck. The civilians got their own website. They were quarantined. The experts continued their work. A month later, the civilian site had produced more articles than the experts had been able to write in a year. The experts, not long after that, just gave up. The civilian site published at a faster and faster pace, which, on its own, is not that surprising. What is surprising is that, over time, those articles have proven reliable. Fallible, contestable, like anything humans make, but good enough.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  In 2005, the journal Nature found that Wikipedia articles were about as reliable as encyclopedia Britannicas. Britannica shut down its print edition seven years later. The question of why this all continues to work really deserves its own story. But this week, I spoke to a longtime veteran Wikipedian, who I experience as almost a human personification of the qualities I enjoy about the site. A person with a rigorous way of thinking, an openness to answering any question, and flashes of a sneaky sense of humor. Can you just say your name and what you do?

• 11:53Speaker 02

  My name is Laine Raspberry. I edit Wikipedia. I'm also a Wikipedian in residence at the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia. You could also call me a data scientist.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  What does it mean to be a Wikipedian in residence? How does one become a Wikipedian in residence?

• 12:12Speaker 02

  You become a Wikipedian in residence by going to an organization and starting to move their content onto Wikipedia and having nobody stop you while you call yourself the staff Wikipedian. I can also pull content out of Wikipedia and give it to people at my university so that they can do research on it.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  Got it. So you're kind of like, you're...

• 12:32Speaker 02

  The Wikipedia person at the university.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  That's the right name for it.

• 12:36Speaker 00

  And so what else does that entail? Like, how often are you interfacing with Wikipedia for the university? Like, how often are you a portal over the course of a given day?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Continuously. This is all that I do at the university. I've been at this university since 2018. I've been a professional Wikipedian since 2012. So I've done nothing but Wikipedia professionally since 2012, full-time.

• 12:56Speaker 00

  And what was your very first experience with Wikipedia, just as a user, before the site had sucked you in entirely?

• 13:04Speaker 02

  It's the same as anyone else. I was an undergraduate in college. I went to Wikipedia and I started vandalizing it.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  What did you vandalize?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  I was taking a chemistry class, and I was vandalizing the Wikipedia article for the Swedish chemist Arineus. And I was making fun of an equation that this particular chemist wrote.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  What was so funny about the equation?

• 13:26Speaker 02

  There was nothing funny about it. There's nothing funny about vandalism. It's like, it's like drawing a picture of a penis on a wall with spray paint. It's that level of humor. Immediately, Wikipedia's patrollers came and told me, "Please, please don't do that." That's another common Wikipedia experience.

• 13:43Speaker 00

  Did you feel chastened at the time? Do you remember?

• 13:45Speaker 02

  I came back later and did it again.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  I didn't, yes, I was immediately chastened, but the chastening wore down after about a month. I came back and did it again. So I vandalized Wikipedia multiple times. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. And people say, "Well, doesn't that make it unreliable?" But there's enough moderation on Wikipedia that the vandalism or the misconduct, it gets caught immediately. And as soon as you get caught, you're connected with another human who wants to talk to you about Wikipedia and pitch you on its finer points and converts you into a constructive editor. And I'm telling you this because this is a recruitment technique by Wikipedia. Because guess what? The kind of person who would think to vandalize Wikipedia is actually a bookish sort of person.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  There's a certain sort of thug that will do another kind of vandalism, but the sort of person who even thinks to vandalize Wikipedia is actually the kind of person who might be recruited to constructively edit Wikipedia.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  I find that to be very beautiful. There's so few parts of the internet that have a story that goes, "People show up to be antisocial here." And in fact, what they don't know is they're joining our nerdy, pro-social community. It's nice to know there's somewhere where that, where the pipeline seems to work sometimes.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  It works in Wikipedia, yes.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  So I'm coming to you with a specific question that we got from a listener to our show. Well, they have a series of questions all around the same topic. The sort of overarching question is this. Who are the people whose private parts show up when you go to the Wikipedia pages for penis, vagina, testicles, breasts, et cetera? How do they, meaning the Wikipedian's, determine which picture shows up there? Is there a board of editors who votes which penis is the most representative penis? Or is it just that whoever got their first called dibs? The question's gone, but like, let's sort of start at the top. If I go to the Wikipedia page for penis, I will see a human penis. Who's the person whose penis I'm seeing?

• 15:50Speaker 02

  You are seeing the penis of somebody who took a picture of their penis and uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons, which is the media repository which complements Wikipedia. So Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It's prose text. There's a Wikimedia ecosystem of other projects. So the text is managed in Wikipedia. The images are managed in something called Wikimedia Commons. So there was a person from the internet, and they created a Wikimedia account. And they had a picture of their penis on their phone or their computer. They uploaded it to Wikimedia Commons from their account. And then they proposed that the picture of their penis be the illustration for the Wikipedia article. When that happens, so behind the scenes of every Wikipedia article, there is a talk page.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  This is where editorial discussions happen. And anyone can join this talk page. So anyone can edit Wikipedia. Anyone can upload pictures to Wikimedia Commons. Anyone can participate in the editorial process. And after an editorial discussion, the people who participated in that decided that this particular penis was the one, among all the other options, which should be in the Wikipedia article.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  So, okay. The talk page is...

• 17:07Speaker 00

  I'm glad we feel the same way about this.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  But the talk page is like the Democratic council underneath each of these pages. And like all of Wikipedia, anybody could be a member of a talk page. But like, someone was a member of this talk page. Like, I am on, right now, wikipedia.org/wiki/penis. Scrolling down the page, I see first an Asian elephant's penis, then I see a mallard duck's penis, which is very funny-looking. Then I see the penis of a dog, which I could see at home. Then I see a bunch of penises of Minky Wells. It takes a while before you get to a person, but eventually, I see a person's penis. And you're saying, this penis that I'm looking at, some, somebody uploaded it to Wikimedia, and then a bunch of Wikipedia editors conferred among themselves, and they chose this penis.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Is it possible to look at the talk page then and to, like, is that discussion preserved? Can we know the logic that chose the penis that I'm looking at?

• 18:06Speaker 02

  It's permanently publicly accessible. Behind every Wikipedia article, again, there's this talk page. There's also a history button associated with every Wikipedia article, where you can see that edit log. Every single edit made to every single Wikipedia article is preserved, and anybody can look at the Wikipedia article at any point in time. You could say this is track changes, like, what changes did anyone propose? So there was a Wikipedia article on penis. It was made in 2001. That's the same year that Wikipedia was established, so one of the first articles that were made. And there's an editorial history of all the discussions, all the edits ever made and all the discussions ever made, about what kind of content, meaning both text and multimedia, the article should contain, and the editorial decisions behind it. So anyone can surface these.

• 18:51Speaker 02

  So an anthropologist could study the editorial history. Someone new could dig into that and say, "I see these past arguments. I have something new to say. Let's make some changes according to my new theory of how things should go." And it's ponderous. It's not easy to come to terms with these things. I would say it's interesting reading. I enjoy reading these kind of things. A Wikipedian would enjoy reading these kind of things. But let me start with a ponderous, a ponderous fact or a ponderous observation.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Please.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  So we have a Wikipedia article called Penis, and that's where you are. And might I suggest you also check out the Wikipedia article for Human Penis?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  So everybody wants to see the elephant penis. That's the lead in the Wikipedia article for Penis. So we have animals and humans there, and invertebrates, these kinds of things. But Human Penis, all human penises. You said that you were also interested in the Wikipedia article for Vagina. Here's something ponderous. Yes? Okay, so we have a Wikipedia article for Penis and Human Penis, two separate articles, two separate editorial histories, two separate photographic choices. For Vagina, we just have a Wikipedia article for Vagina. So there is editorial demand for pictures of animal penises, okay, and human penises. But there is only informational and editorial demand for vaginas in general.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  You're saying that what I should make of the fact that there's, that I can more easily access images of animal penises on Wikipedia, that's a function of the people coming to Wikipedia, this is what they're clamoring for. They're clamoring to see the penis of an elephant, but they're not clamoring to see the vagina of an elephant?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  That's exactly what I'm saying. And I'm not telling you why that is. I'm just saying that that's an observation, and that's the way things have played out. Editorially in Wikipedia, I would say, as a Wikipedia researcher, that that's a reflection of interest on the internet and a proxy for interest at large in the population.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Okay, so wait, but before we, I have a follow-up question about that, but before we even get to that, this is such a treasure trove, for curiosity. What?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  So I'm on the human penis page. The sort of, the star penis, the first penis I see is also the star penis that I saw on the general penis page.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  And I guess I'm curious about the history of this image, the owner of this image. What can we know about this penis that I'm looking at?

• 21:19Speaker 02

  So a few things to say about this penis. We can deconstruct this. So I'll give you some information and you can make what you want of it. It's all ponderous. I'm not going to draw your conclusions. You draw your own conclusions. So there was a Wikipedia article on penis, 2001. That was one of the first ones. Some years later, it was decided there should be an article on human penis, separate from animal penises in general. And there was always discussion about which penis should be used as an illustration. And the picture that you're talking about, so at the top of human penis, there's a particular penis. This is considered the lead image and it's the most valuable real estate in any Wikipedia article. What is the first picture people see? Because there's a lot of people that come to a Wikipedia article, they get quick answers, they see the thing and then they leave.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  So this is, this is the penis that represents humanity's penis. It's, it's very high-traffic article. This is one of the most popular Wikipedia articles. It's always been one of the most popular Wikipedia articles. This is the most popular penis in the world. More people have seen this penis than any other penis in the world.

• 22:18Speaker 00

  This penis, the penis I'm looking at is the most seen penis in the entire world.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  This might be the most important penis ever in terms of like how it's influenced the way people think about penises.

• 22:28Speaker 00

  Sorry, is it possible to know how many people have seen this penis?

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Let's see, I'd have to do the calculation, but say like three, three million times every year since, since 2012.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  So, you know, 30, 40 million times.

• 22:44Speaker 00

  So this penis has been viewed something like 30 or 40 million times.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  That's a lot of times.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you'd, you'd be hard-pressed to find like another, another single penis viewed that many times by such a large segment of humanity around the world.

• 23:00Speaker 00

  So the listener who had emailed us, part of what they were asking is they said they were becoming sexually educated in the early 2000s with, you know, the launch of Wikipedia. And they said they got their information about sex from Wikipedia. This was, I think, a formative penis for them. And for them, they're like, oh, their sense of the range of a normal, of what a normal penis might look like came from looking at images on Wikipedia. Like Wikipedia anatomy pages had made up just his baseline understanding of the human body. Like this had been his sex ed, or at least, I mean, I'm sure he got sexual education other places, but this was his sort of primary source.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Okay, so Wikipedia is a very popular information source for education and general informative purposes on gender and sexuality. So it's been long discussed and long recognized since mid, mid 2000s in the scholarly literature and really, really since the start of Wikipedia. The people come to Wikipedia and they look up articles on anatomy and sex and sex positions, sexual orientations and sexually transmitted infections, sexual health, dating, marriage, relationships and kink.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  So all of these are definitely in the top most popular Wikipedia articles. This is true globally and this has always been the case. So all of these are very popular. And what we've been talking about with penis, these things are contested in every single one of those articles in the same way.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  And how does Wikipedia as a culture think about the responsibility of being a primary sex ed resource for humanity?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  It's a mixed response. So I'll, I'll tell you some of the stakeholders. So it happens that I organize with Wikimedia LGBT, which is the community of Wikimedia ians who are interested in LGBT content. And it's not that LGBT people have a monopoly over sex or sexuality. However, there's something inherently sexual about an LGBT status and people ask LGBT people about sexuality anyway. And the LGBT community, it, it tends to be more involved in articles on anatomy or sexual health, gender, relationships, these kinds of things. I'm also involved with another Wikimedia community. It's called Wikimedia Medicine.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  So these are a lot of people who participate in particularly public health communication, the kind of health issues that if a person who's not medically trained has information, then they can use that to inform their decisions about their sexual health. And by having that information, they have better health outcomes.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  So sexual health, it's not just something that a person goes to the doctor and the doctor fixes. Actually, there's certain behaviors about sexual health that if you have information, you're going to be a healthier person. And if you don't have information, you're more likely to get a sexually transmitted infection. So there's a lot of medical people who, who edit these things from a medical perspective, bring those in. Some other groups, the Wiki Women's Groups for different reasons, they're more involved in sexual health, just in the course of advocating for protection of women in Wikipedia. So those are three groups that I would identify that's particularly interested.

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Is there another Wikipedia page like the penis one in terms of popularity, attention? Like, is there another Wikipedia page that like pulses with this energy?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yes. So as a transition, let me mention a kind of penis that's requested in the human penis article that's not there, that is also a hot topic. So what penises are missing? And if you talk to a Wikipedia, they could give you lots of critique. Like if we had, if we had 10 hours, we could talk for 10 hours about this stuff. I understand the nature of this. And if anybody wants to, you can contact other Wikipedians to get other opinions. Every Wikipedian is prepared to do an interview like this. But if you go into the talk page archives, one requested penis is people say, can I see a transgender girl penis? And what they mean by that is they want to see a full-body nude transgender girl that's, has breasts and has a penis. That's the kind of penis that is, is being requested.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  And why is that penis not on the Wikipedia penis page?

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Because it's a minority penis, because it's, it's not representative enough. So even though it's a hot topic politically, transgender rights is a hot topic politically, it's actually not such a common anatomical situation. Things could change or it could become more prominent. Wikipedia lags a bit behind because it's informationally conservative. So we look at the sources, we look at the academic literature, we look at the textbooks, we ask experts, what information do people need? And also it's not exactly focused on a penis. You can describe this kind of thing without showing a penis and breasts in the same pictures. Like there's, there's, that's getting to the point of sexualizing or eroticizing and that's not what we want for this article.

• 28:09Speaker 00

  But how do you decide? Like, so I understand the first part of the view, which is to say, we have to discriminate in terms of which penises we're going to show. And so the, not discrimination in the prejudicial sense, but like our sort of cut here will be how statistically in the real world represented are these penises? And those, that's going to be the bouquet of penises that you see. And while there are trans women with penises in the world, certainly statistically speaking in America, there's not as many and so we're not going to show it. I get, that's part of the argument. Am I understanding it right?

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Everything is correct there, except the in the American part. So remember that Wikipedia is global. It's not just very popular in the United States. It's also popular globally. And many people speak English as a second language. So even if there's another language Wikipedia version that they could be using, their local language, many people prefer to use English Wikipedia just because it's, it's more developed. But it's, it's global. People from all over the world are seeing this. So it's not about just trans representation in the United States. It's, it's global.

• 29:11Speaker 00

  It says that international trans representation.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  But wouldn't there also, and I'm not, I'm not, I have no dog in this fight, but it surprises me only because I would think that part of what it would also be driven by is just curiosity. It seems like some of the decision-making behind the penis page is driven by curiosity. So part of me is surprised that if this is something people are curious about, that that wouldn't be a reason to, to display it.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  So about the, about the curiosity, you've heard of this phenomenon, the Wikipedia rabbit hole. People start at one article, they click through and they satisfy their curiosity, jumping Wikipedia article to Wikipedia article through the hyperlinks and they find the content that they want.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  I've spent some time in them.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Right. Guess what? If somebody wants to see a transgender girl's penis, it is possible for them to click enough times and find one of those in the Wikimedia ecosystem.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  I see. This is just literally whether it's on the page for human penis.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Right. And you were asking, is, are there comparable philosophical discussions elsewhere? And could I direct you to any Wikipedia article about transgender issues?

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Right. That's a place where you see also a very lively talk page.

• 30:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Remember, the reason we were here at all, talking about any of this, is because of a question asked by our listener, Leon. Leon, who many years ago had gotten his sexual education from Wikipedia as a young gay kid, and who suspected as an adult that he wasn't alone in that experience. Leon had wanted to peek into the minds of the many authors who'd first explained sex to him. He'd also wanted to know about this one specific penis and its owner, a topic I promise we'll return to. But for a moment, here's what had snagged my attention: how seriously Lain and his fellow Wikipedians took their jobs as de facto sex ed teachers to the world, not just to people like young Leon, to people everywhere, who approached the site sometimes from very different cultural starting points.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  So I know from Wikimedia Medicine that we've had people go to different public health agencies in different countries around the world and say, "You could use Wikipedia to improve outcomes in your population. Share Wikipedia content instead of writing it from fresh or reinventing the general reference information that Wikipedia has. Why don't you reuse Wikipedia's information?" And in doing this, we've heard from public health professionals in different countries, "We," meaning more westernized, "it just happens that way." So, Western people tend to have a first mover advantage at Wikipedia in many ways. Some other countries have said, "We'd like to share your health information. Could you please remove information on family planning or contraceptives?"

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  And that's been kind of abrasive to, say, editors in the United States that had this conversation in the context of the women's rights movement some decades ago. But not every country and culture has had a conversation about birth control pills or family planning or the woman's place in deciding these things in the way that, say, the United States has had these things. And it's not that we want to be colonial or force anybody. The different language versions present a version of Wikipedia that's appropriate for their culture. But at the same time, we do want people to have access to information if the editors of that local language version choose to include it.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  It's so strange to think, like, 25 years ago, somebody just thought, "I can put an encyclopedia on the internet." And then the level of cultural sensitivity and thoughtfulness you end up needing to arrive at a quarter of a century later is just, like, surprisingly dense.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  There's a lot of things to discover. And it's still difficult in every country, in every culture. It's still difficult to talk about sexuality, sexual education. So people have said, "Can you turn off the images of penises in the Wikipedia article? What if a child comes or a minor comes to Wikipedia? Should you age restrict Wikipedia?" And this is a major political development around the world. Should access to websites be age restricted? The major social media platforms are putting age restrictions. There's different kinds of regulations on this. And the Wikimedia community's perspective is that we want everyone in the world to be able to access Wikipedia. We want everyone in the world to be able to read Wikipedia. There's nothing obscene in Wikipedia.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  And we don't want to have barriers or logins for people to access this information.

• 33:42Speaker 00

  So Wikipedia's perspective for now is the site would prefer not to age gate because it goes against the ethos of what this open reference material is supposed to be?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yes, and also, there's discussions about what should be age gated. So there's some interest that would say you need to age gate family planning and contraceptive information. That's obscenity. And there's some people who say you need to age gate any information about being queer or sexual orientation, because some sexual orientations are prohibited in a country or culture. Very common. Actually, I think that there's-- just my read of the situation, and I'm doing my best to, like, read the spirit of the world. But I think there's actually more cultures that would be interested in Wikipedia age gating the article on queer than the article on penis. Censorship is a recurring topic when Wikipedians get together. It's not just censorship about sexuality. It's about every single war in the world.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  So Wikipedians are persecuted in every single country and all kinds of topics. Some of the kinds of persecution, if you edit Wikipedia articles on sexuality, people will harass you. I've experienced harassment for this. Many people in Wikimedia LGBT and Wikimedia Medicine, they can talk about this. Any Wikipedian who edits a Wikipedia article about a politician, particularly a politician scandal, whatever the country in the world, there's going to be a certain amount of danger associated with that. There's Wikipedians in prison right now for editing Wikipedia articles.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  Where?

• 35:09Speaker 02

  I've got a colleague. His name is Osama Khalid. He is in Saudi Arabia. You can read about him on Wikipedia. So he came to our conferences. He is a physician. He translated Wikipedia articles from English into Arabic language. He came to Wiki LGBT. And he said, "What can I do to help you?" And we said, "Can you help translate the article on HIV and AIDS?" And it's not that he had a particular involvement with Wikimedia LGBT, but he was a physician going to help where he could. He was a medical student at the time. He finished medical school. He got married. He had a kid. He is arrested. And there's public information about this. There's other examples.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  So you can look at the Wikipedia article on Wikipedians imprisoned or arrested or harassed for editing Wikipedia. There's a lot of stories of this. Because a lot of people who do this, they don't realize the danger that they're getting into. These people are not activists or trying to stand out or trying to make a point. They're just sharing general reference information and citing reliable sources, not trying to be edgy. And this happens to them.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  I know this is a somewhat grim place to find ourselves in a story about the internet's most famous penis. But I will say, as someone who's marveled from far away about Wikipedia's continued existence, talking to someone inside of it, thinking about how hard people there work to keep it running, even sometimes at the cost of their own freedom, it makes me feel, this is weird, almost patriotic for the internet, or for what it can sometimes be. So much of what I see online just feels like an absolute feast of evidence for nihilists. And yet, here's one place where anonymous strangers volunteer their time, where many ponderous conversations lead to a free, infinite library. A minor miracle.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  I digress. We're going to take a short break. When we return, we will leave the wonder and anguish of the internet's information workers and go find out what we can about the emperor who wears no clothes.

• 37:50Speaker 00

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• 41:07Speaker 00

  Welcome back to the show. Enough with all the learning about stuff. Let's talk about the penis that brought us to Lane's door. And so what can we know about the owner of this image, who I'm assuming, but I'm not certain, is the owner of this penis?

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Sure. So you're not the first person to ask this question. There's other journalists that have asked a question and got answers in other kinds of ways. But I'll give you the perspective from what we know about the Wikipedia metadata and our editorial process. So every time someone makes an edit to Wikipedia or uploads an image to Wikimedia Commons, they have a Wikimedia account. We can examine that account. So it's public information. You don't need to be logged in. Anyone can examine these things. So the person who uploaded this picture of their penis, or a penis, presume it's the uploader.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  This penis is the only thing that they've ever uploaded. So somebody created a Wikipedia account. They uploaded a picture, and this is not normal behavior. Most people that come to Wikipedia, if they're going to upload pictures, they upload a few pictures. Or if they're going to make edits, they do a few edits. So this person, in 2012, they rocked up. They said, here's my penis. I'm out of here.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Their one contribution, at least under this account, to the entire corpus of Wikimedia was a picture of probably their penis.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  You could go beyond Wikipedia. Like, I really doubt this person has ever done anything with such a societal impact bigger than this. It's not just the biggest thing they've done in Wikipedia. Who does something with greater impact than this? It's not common.

• 42:39Speaker 00

  And can we know anything about their intentions? Did they leave any trace on the talk page? Did they say anything about what they meant by doing this?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  What is the meaning of this?

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  So them alone, we don't have other information about the person. They uploaded their penis. They left. They haven't been back. And they haven't engaged in Wikipedia. They haven't engaged in Wikimedia Commons. They just haven't done anything since. But something else that I could tell you is that they're not the only person who's done this. Actually, there's quite a lot of people who've come to Wikipedia, uploaded a picture of a penis, and then left.

• 43:19Speaker 00

  What do you mean? Like, have they been competitors to be the hero shot on the page? Or have they just said, I would like to add this image of this penis to Wikipedia?

• 43:29Speaker 02

  Like I said, I'm a data scientist, and I'd like, I wish that I had the computational power to look at this in general. Like, how many people come to Wikipedia and go to the zoo, and they upload a picture of an elephant, and that's the only thing they do, and then leave?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Like, what are the trends of when somebody comes to Wikipedia, does one thing, and then leaves forever? It's actually, I don't think it's so common. But with penis, it's a thing that people do. Like, people will do this with penis. They won't do it with, say, historical buildings in their community, wherever they live in the world.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  I went back, after we spoke, to the talk section of the Wikipedia page for the human penis, just to see this battle for supremacy myself. It's less like looking at a long discussion, more like mainlining 900 seasons of Game of Thrones as different powers rise and fall over the years, each attempting to climb the Iron Throne.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  I wasn't the first journalist to survey this contest. A writer named Brian Van Hooker had written the definitive chronology of the battle for a short-lived online magazine called Mel a few years before. The Wikipedia penis page itself is born on November 8, 2001, two months after the worst domestic terror attack in American history. A moment of aching national grief in which, nevertheless, the quotidian parts of life continued, including one day that fall, when a user added a penis page to Wikipedia. Perhaps in a nod to the mood of solemnity, they did not include on that page an actual image of a penis. For the first couple of years, that spirit of prudishness reigned. When images were added, they were removed, sometimes within minutes.

• 45:01Speaker 00

  Then, in the summer of 2003, the wall was for the first time ever breached. A user uploaded a set of simple, black-and-white, medical-looking penis photos. And for whatever reason, the moderators let them stay. But those penises lived further down the page, in the details section, competing for attention in a collage. The top of the page, the headline spot, stayed empty until 2004, when it was claimed, not by a man, but by a drawing, a simple, encyclopedic, medical diagram. For years, actual humans competed for that spot. Penises were submitted for consideration as lead image, and the moderators controlling the page rejected them, one after another. Bouncers at the world's most popular library. Not tonight.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  The penises submitted were often labeled with the worst insult Wikipedia can offer. The penises were called "unencyclopedic." Van Hooker, the writer, recounts the story of a user named Bob, who kept insisting, kept trying the door. Not apparently with just his own penis, but with a kind of coterie of different penis images. Bob believed in his heart that the lead image on the penis page should be of an actual penis, not a diagram. So he'd upload and be rejected. Upload and be rejected. For over a year, Bob fought. Summer 2008, he fights the other mods to a draw. The diagram comes down, a photograph goes up. But the moderators cheerishly refused to use any of Bob's penises. Instead, it's this blurry, black-and-white photo with labels.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  It looks like the rushed photo someone would have snapped of Bigfoot's penis. Bob won the battle, but surveying the result, it's hard to say was worth it.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  February 2010, a new claimant arrives. A user posts a photo from someone named Polar Stern, apparently from Germany, whose penis image, possibly his own, is of a white person's penis with a shock of unkempt blonde pubic hair, a Targaryen. His full-color photograph unseats the black-and-white one, and now Polar Stern sits the throne.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Later that year, the kingdom actually faces a schism. The penis page splits in two. A general penis entry, which is handed over to the animals, whale penises in jars, an elephant, as well as a new "human penis" page, where Polar Stern carries his crown across the border and reigns for about two years. But there's a problem, and the moderators know it. The most famous, most viewed image of a human penis on Earth is Caucasian. White people internationally are a minority. Why should a white man's penis represent everyone? In April 2012, an answer arrives. A user uploads a new image. Uncircumcised, darker skin tone, racially ambiguous. A penis, the argument goes, that could belong to almost any race.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  And where past successions had taken months of warfare, this one takes a single day. The moderators reach consensus almost immediately, which is how the reign of a user named Coast One begins. The epoch we still live in. Coast One's penis mounts the Iron Throne on April 30, 2012, where it has stayed ever since. Pretenders have a beard over the years, dethroning him for a few hours here, a few minutes there. But every usurper is swiftly removed. The king restored. His reign is now well into its second decade. Although, if you look at what's happened in the world since the relative tranquility of April 2012, I would posit that we ought to have some questions for our monarch. However, he's anonymous. We can't ask him anything.

• 48:34Speaker 00

  I asked Lane to tell me what a veteran Wikipedian notices when contemplating this chosen penis.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Okay. First, let's consider the technical quality of the photograph. So when someone uploads images to Wikimedia Commons, we evaluate these from a photographic perspective. What is the subject matter? What is it focused on? What is the resolution of the image? What's the native size of it? Is this good photography? Is this good modeling? Is this good lighting? Is the picture clear? And this is not a good photo. This is not somebody in a modeling studio. So the lighting is bad. The resolution is low. This is not a technically good photograph, and not the kind of thing that Wikipedia would normally want at the lead of an article, especially one to get so much traffic as this one.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Regarding the subject matter, so this person is racially ambiguous, which is fine, and it's not determinate. So we only have the penis in this picture. This is not a crop of a larger photo where the model showed their full nude body or their face. They just uploaded their penis. And that's all the information we have. It's a flaccid penis. It is not erect. It's not a penis in action. It's not peeing. It's not ejaculating. It's not doing anything. It's not wearing any jewelry. It happens to be shaven, which is a matter of controversy, because some people say you should show the natural penis. There's a lot of talk, editorial talk, on the talk page of this article about the extent to which the penises in the article

• 50:09Speaker 02

  are representative of humanity in general.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  You mean there are people on the talk page who would say that if we have a, say, like, large longitudinal survey that says that 72% of men have unshaven genitals, then the penis that people see when they go to the Wikipedia page should be an unshaven penis? That sort of is the idea?

• 50:30Speaker 02

  The criteria is uncertain, but you're thinking in the correct way. Somehow or another, people want the platonic ideal of a penis.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 50:40Speaker 00

  So it should be a, and the platonic ideal of a penis, like, none of us can, we're all looking at shadows of penises on walls of caves, but like,

• 50:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 50:50Speaker 00

  It should be unglamorous, sort of average-sized, like, not bejeweled. Like, it should be like, like, in my mind, sometimes I go to saunas, like,

• 51:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  And I'll see penises at saunas. This looks like a sauna penis. Like, it just looks like a regular part of a regular body.

• 51:11Speaker 02

  So generally, we want high technical performance with the photography. But maybe that's not the way people usually see pictures of penises. Maybe like, the typical picture of a penis is really something that someone just pulls out their phone and takes a picture of, and that's the penis.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  A grainy furtive shot of a grainy furtive body part.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Yes, you're thinking like a Wikipedia editor.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  It's all very philosophical.

• 51:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  Lane Raspberry, Wikimedia in Residence at the University of Virginia. He has been editing the site, which survives on reader donations since 2004.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Thank you for talking about all of this, and so thoughtfully. Thank you.

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, PJ.

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Before we end this episode, one important fact-checking note in the spirit of virtuous ponderousness. Piper Dumont, who fact-checked our show this week, raised an issue. Are we sure that the Wikipedia penis is the most viewed actual penis in all of human history? It's certainly one of the top two, but the other contender would have to be the penis of the singer Ray J, co-star of Kim Kardashian's sex tape, most viewed sex tape in all of human history. It gets tricky. The penis Wikipedia page we know has been viewed many, many millions of times, but we know the current penis was not there for all of those views. Our best estimate is that this specific penis has probably been viewed tens of millions of times, possibly more. Kim Kardashian's video has supposedly been viewed hundreds of millions of times,

• 52:43Speaker 00

  but that number comes from the company that sells it. It's pirated on lots of different streaming sites, and obviously not every person watches the whole thing. So it's confounding. Of course, there's also images of statue David, but we're not counting that because it's a marble statue, not an image of a real human penis. None of this undermines the spirit of the question. This is an extraordinarily important penis image for all the reasons we discussed today. But Search Engine is committed to honesty about what can be known and which facts we have to hold with requisite uncertainty.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, PJ Vogt, and Trudy Pimmoneney. Gary Graham is our senior producer. Emily Malter is our associate producer. Our production intern is Piper Dumont, who also fact-checked this week's episode. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Also, some special thanks this week. Thanks to Meg Swatcha and Robin Cantor for helping us find Lane. And Robin, congratulations on your bottom surgery. I just had to feel free to mention that because the timing seemed appropriately funny. Also, special thanks to Sam Krieger, who graced us with an office visit. Our executive producer is Leah Reese Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Mirandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor-Moore, Karen Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, Vanessa Tinkati, and Hillary Schuff.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  If you have a business and would like to advertise on Search Engine, please send us an email, [email protected], subject line "Advertising." If you have a question for the show, that is also the place to send in your questions. We are always looking for more questions. If you're a listener and would like to never hear an ad on the show, you can sign up for incognito mode. It's our paid feed. It is what funds the show and keeps us going along with ads. You also get bonus episodes. You can find information about incognito mode at searchengine.show. Thank you, as always, for listening. We will see you very soon.

• 54:59Speaker 00

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