Pedophilia whitewash at Wikipedia

As some of you know, I regularly edit wikipedia articles. Just for fun. Occasionally, I get dragged into articles far outside my own field. In the recent weeks, while being incapacitated with a replaced hip, I ended up in the discussions related to pedophilia. The Wikipedia article about pedophilia is pretty much a wet dream for lawyers. It is so unilaterally focused on the medical operationalization used by the DSM IV of the term, which by definition will leave out many cases that I would consider pedophile's. For example, if a person has many sexual explicit fantasies about how he has sex with a 11 year old, but those fantasies do not cause him either distress of interpersonal difficulty, guess what, he is not a pedophile.

But it gets better. If you have to believe the people of the Clarke Institute, he would not have been a pedophile even when it had caused him distress, because the child is too old. James Cantor, an active wikipedia editor who not always knows the limits of self-promotion as in this edit where he links to an interview with himself related to the topic, regularly comments on the talk page of the article. In and by itself, that is a good thing. Wikipedia needs expert editors. The reason you want expert editors is that they often know the field much better than the lay editors that are the bulk of the workforce at wikipedia. When you have such an expert editor, you see it in the width of the sources they use, the nuances they can express, and the skill with which they put in words the controversies, differences of opinion, and unresolved issues in the field. So, when someone added a so-so source, James proposes to replace it with....... You guessed it, an article of himself. A primary source as well. if that had been the ONLY article available, o well, than I understand, but when there are multiple second and tertiary sources available, this is not acceptable.

This provides us with some idea why this article is so biased towards the medical operationalization of the term as used in the DSM IV, and not towards the more general usage of the term which generally is defined as something like:

"sexual perversion in which children are the preferred sexual object" Merrian Webster online

"a person, especially a man, who is sexually interested in children", Cambridge Dictionary online

or how many more examples can be given.

To illustrate how US biased the article is, lets look at the World Health Organizations definition in the ICD10:

"A sexual preference for children, boys or girls or both, usually of prepubertal or early pubertal age", ICD 10 F65.4

Lets see, if we use this definition, our pedophile friend example in the beginning would be properly diagnosed as a pedophile, even when his interest was in somewhat older children. As it should be.

The pedophilia article at wikipedia makes a classic error. It goes completely overboard by focusing on the medical operationalization of the term at the cost of common sense and general definitions that are far more generally used. A good article would start with the general term, and then work towards the more specialized definitions. Wikipedia does it the other way round. When you start reading the wikipedia article, you might think that most people we normally would label a pedophile are just not that. And that is wrong. Medical operationalizations are necessary for research, but they should not eclipse the more general used term and basically free many pedophiles of the label they despise and would like to get rid of. Thanks to wikipedia, an ever increasing primary source of information, they are no longer pedophiles. Good job!

Disclaimer: I tried to change some things for the better, but one editor specific, and several more in general pretty much block any improvement of the article that is not in line with the medical operationalization of the term.