[Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists

[Tobias Oelgarte]

Yes, it is an analogy to KnowledgeBlock, with predefinable lists, 
encouraged to be created by censors best friends, to be shared by the 
local ISPs to give an good understanding in what shouldn't be known.


Putting the sarcasm aside and switching to irony, I see a complicated 
system with very few potential users:

Problems for users/readers:
* The average reader doesn't find the talk page, but it is expected by 
him to manage self maintained filter lists?
* He needs to be shocked first, before he gets informed that such a 
feature exists. Or he will have to trust lists created by someone he 
don't even know.

Problems for the infrastructure:
* Every account stores an additional list of what to block. Doing it 
also for IPs via cookies will create an huge amount of information that 
needs to be managed. (Considering the fact that it is actually used as 
massively as the demand is described by Andreas Kolbe/Jayen466)
* Every use of the filter will circumvent the caching since every page 
requested by a user/reader that uses the filter will have to be created 
from scratch.

Problems in general:
* If we use public lists then the approach is basically the same as with 
categorized filtering. The only difference is, that it is stored in 
another format. Today we serve the same eggs sunny side down.
* Who creates the lists? The user for himself? Considering million of 
images and articles it isn't an option to do it alone. Someone who has a 
lot of freetime? Yes, considering the fact, that he doesn't want to see 
at all the pictures he looks at...


Putting the irony aside an switching to realism:

Every approach aside the "hide anything feature" that i have seen so far 
is either on the borderline to censorship, practically impossible to 
maintain or generally unusable by the average reader. The only thing i 
noticed is, that every approach seems to be right to introduce some kind 
of filter. If option A is no good, then lets try option B and if B is 
also not the right way then lets try C,... Currently we are at option Z 
II, and it looks not very different from option B, but very importantly 
it is better in the wording and it sounds nicer, like an old bike with a 
foxtail attached is much better then just an old bike.

I'm very curious what we try to achieve with this filter? Is it really 
to get more readers or is it just to introduce a filter that is in some 
way predefinable? Where is the opposition against the simple "hide 
anything feature"? It is simple, can quickly be implemented, doesn't 
cost much money and serves 99% of the mentioned purposes for filtering. 
But why the hell isn't it an option for our filter-fan-boys and 
filter-fan-girls?

nya~

Am 26.11.2011 15:41, schrieb Tom Morris:
> On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 14:59, Tobias Oelgarte
> <tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>> I'm a little bit confused by this approach. On the one side it is good
>> to have this information stored privately and personal, on the other
>> side we encouraging the development of filter lists and the tagging of
>> possibly objectionable articles. The later wouldn't be private at all
>> and even worse then tagging single images. In fact it would be some kind
>> of additional force to ban images from articles just to keep them in the
>> "clean" section.
>>
>> Overall i see little to now advantage over the previously supposed
>> solutions. It is much more complicated, harder to implement, more
>> resource intensive and not a very friendly interface for readers.
>>
> Err, think of it with an analogy to AdBlock. You can have lists stored
> privately (in Adblock: in your browser settings files, in an image
> filter: on the WMF servers but in a secret file that they'll never
> ever ever ever release promise hand-on-heart*) and you can have lists
> stored publicly (in Adblock: the various public block lists that are
> community-maintained so that you don't actually see any ads, in an
> image filter: on the web somewhere). And you can put an instruction in
> the former list to transclude everything on a public list and keep it
> up-to-date.
>
> Given it works pretty well in Adblock, I don't quite see how that's a
> big deal for Wikimedia either. Performance wise, you just have it so
> the logged in user has a list of images they don't want to see, and
> you have a script that every hour or so downloads and caches the
> public list, then when they call to retrieve the list for the purposes
> of seeing what's on it, it simply concatenates the two. This seems
> pretty straightforward.
>
> And if the WMF doesn't do it - perhaps because people are whinging
> that me being given the option to opt-in and *not* see "My
> micropenis.jpg" is somehow evil and tyrannical and contrary to
> NOTCENSORED - it could possibly be done as a service by an outside
> group and then implemented on Wikipedia using userscripts. The
> difference is that the WMF may do it in a slightly more user-friendly
> way given that they have access to the servers.
>
> * That's less sarcastic than it sounds.
>