The Chosen One

Search Engine - PJ Vogt

In this episode of 'Search Engine,' host PJ Vogt explores the curious question posed by listener Leon: who decides which image of a penis appears on

Key takeaways

• Wikipedia's success stems from its open-editing model despite initial skepticism about reliability.
• Images like the Wikipedia penis are selected through community consensus and adherence to strict guidelines on neutrality, sourcing, and quality.

Main topics

• The selection process behind anatomical images on Wikipedia
• The history and evolution of Wikipedia's editing model

Notable quotes

"I can't imagine, not even for profit, but just for curiosity and experience and perhaps to contribute to the knowledge of global commons."

"This being perhaps the most viewed penis in human history..."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that while the specific image of a penis on Wikipedia may not be officially 'chosen' by any single person,

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) 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 pjvote85 at gmail.com. Thanks, and here's our show this week. Speaker 3 (0:53) Do you want to introduce yourself? Just say your name? Yes, I'm Leon. I live in San Francisco, originally from Amsterdam, moved here five years ago, and longtime listener Speaker 4 (1:02) of the show. Leon had sent in a question, a good one, about something that it had never occurred to me to wonder about. Speaker 3 (1:09) Can you just tell me what your question was? 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. Speaker 4 (1:24) 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. Speaker 3 (1:39) 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? 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 going to accept it. It's funny, my whole... Speaker 4 (2:40) 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 that's like, I kind of want to know how to slide my picture in the file. Speaker 3 (2:58) 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 up full as a teenager, like that genuinely made it from the first and last vagina I ever Speaker 4 (3:12) saw. So it's a question I really want answered. 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. Keep going. Speaker 3 (3:45) That's all the private parts I can think of. Speaker 4 (3:48) 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. Right. Like, I kind of buy the theory of the question. Speaker 3 (4:04) 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 rubric and decision criteria as well. Speaker 4 (4:27) 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. 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. Speaker 4 (5:37) The following conversation is brought to you by LabCorp On Demand. I have a bad habit, which is that I get obsessed with work and relationships, and I just forget to check in about my own health. I'm working on it. But because of that, I asked search engine listeners to call in if they had stories about medical tests they'd taken where they'd actually found something surprising, which is how I ended up one afternoon talking to a listener named Kristen. And what was the occasion for you getting testing done at all? Speaker 1 (6:02) I would switch to a new primary physician. She just gave a battery of tests, some of which are typical for kind of aging women. And often we have low iron, which makes us tired. And so she just put that test in, but mine came up really high. Speaker 4 (6:17) Kristen said that specifically her ferritin number was very elevated. Ferritin is a blood protein that stores iron. It turned out she had something called hemochromatosis. I Speaker 1 (6:26) have a disorder where instead of not having enough iron, I have an iron overload. Eventually over time, that iron load would kind of destroy your organs, but there's no symptoms of it. So it's just a good thing that she ordered that test and found it. Speaker 4 (6:40) The last time we did one of these segments, we learned about the perils of too much copper, but it turns out iron can be perilous too. The dangers of elements. One way to treat a high iron load is with a phlebotomy, which is just removing large amounts of blood from your body. Removing the blood means you're removing excess iron too. It's a very old school sounding medical technique that actually works in modern times. When Speaker 1 (7:02) I go to the hematologist, they'll just literally take my blood. I can't even donate it. This huge, you know, bag of blood and they have to throw it away. Speaker 4 (7:09) That's so metal. I Speaker 1 (7:10) know. And this is interesting. I got this disorder from my mom, hereditarily-wise, but I have the veins of my dad, which are invisible, and usually it takes some five or six pokes to... Because it's Speaker 2 (7:23) a Speaker 1 (7:23) much larger needle to do this blood draw, the phlebotomy. However, at LabCorp, my people there know me now. They know they have to do it out of my hand. Those needles are a lot smaller. I have a whole system where, you know, they taught me to drink a ton of water for the 48 hours before. I take baby aspirin for a week before, which makes it much easier. Speaker 2 (7:40) for Speaker 1 (7:41) them to draw my blood. So it's kind of a team effort there now. Speaker 4 (7:44) Kristen said that with this treatment, she's gotten her iron levels back under control, though she still has to go get a routine phlebotomy about twice a year. I'm glad you're safe and healthy. Speaker 1 (7:53) Oh, thank you. Speaker 4 (7:55) It's important as a person to be proactive about your health, find out what's going on in your body, and not just wait for things to go wrong. And if you want more insight into what's happening, there's an easy way to get it. LabCorp OnDemand. For me personally, one very real preoccupation in my mind as I entered the fun excitement of middle age is I'm just trying to think more about my own health. Testing with a doctor's guidance can be an important part of that. If you have questions about your overall health, LabCorp OnDemand is a trusted way to get insights that can power you forward, and you can do it from home. Just visit the website and choose from a suite of more than 100 lab tests, including micronutrient, cortisol, fitness, testosterone, and more. From there, visit the LabCorp location closest to you to get tested. It takes only days to receive reliable, easy-to-understand results from a lab doctor's trust. Ready to start knowing yourself? Visit labcorp.com slash search engine and use code search to save up to 15 % on select tests. That's labcorp.com slash search engine and use code search. Know yourself. Welcome back to the show. 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. 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. In 2005, the journal Nature found that Wikipedia articles were about as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica's. 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? Speaker 2 (11:13) My name is Lane Raspberry. I edit Wikipedia. I'm also Wikimedian in residence at the School of Data Science at the University of Virginia. You could also call me a data scientist. Speaker 4 (11:25) What does it mean to be a Wikimedian in residence? How does one become a Wikimedian in residence? You Speaker 2 (11:32) become a Wikimedian 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. Got it. So you're kind of like, you're... The Wikipedia person at the university. Got Speaker 4 (11:54) it. That's the right name for Speaker 2 (11:55) it. Speaker 4 (11:56) 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? Speaker 2 (12:04) 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. Speaker 4 (12:16) And what was your very first experience with Wikipedia just as a user before the site had sucked you in entirely? Speaker 2 (12:23) It's the same as anyone else. I was an undergraduate in college. I went to Wikipedia and I started vandalizing it. Speaker 4 (12:30) What did you vandalize? Speaker 2 (12:32) I was taking a chemistry class and I was vandalizing the Wikipedia article for the Swedish chemist Arrhenius. And I was making fun of an equation that this particular chemist wrote. What was so funny about the Speaker 4 (12:45) equation? Speaker 2 (12:46) There was nothing funny about it. There's nothing funny about vandalism. It's like drawing a picture of a penis on