Well, I am unsurprised that it has been considered before, as it's the
obvious solution. Sad that the Board lacked the will to see it through.
But it doesn't mean that it could not or should not be raised again. Social
justice issues rarely succeed on their first attempt. If we took that
attitude, women still wouldn't have the vote.
The group we should be most concerned about is younger children. With many
children increasingly having smartphones, it is far harder for parents to
supervise the content they are viewing (unlike a desktop that can be
positioned where the parent can keep an eye on things). At the same time,
WMF is putting increasing effort into the mobile platforms and the WMF
metrics show consistent uptrends in mobile access. The two trends suggest
that Wikipedia and Commons are now a lot more likely to be accessed by
children in an unsupervised context.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: shimgray(a)gmail.com [mailto:shimgray@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Andrew
Gray
Sent: Saturday, 26 July 2014 4:08 AM
To: kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com; Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to
increase the participation of women within Wikimedia projects.
Subject: Re: [Spam] Re: [Gendergap] Sexualized environment on Commons
Hi Kerry,
Sad as it is to be the bearer of dispiriting news...
A proposal more or less similar to this was made by the Board in 2011
(some kind of image filtering on a user-selected basis) -
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content
The debate about whether (and/or how) to implement it was pretty
vicious, pretty angry, and went on for the best part of a year. A
September 2011 community poll gave interestingly mixed results -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-09-05/News_a
nd_notes
and the development of any software was suspended pending further
discussion. In mid-2012, the Board then formally rescinded the
"develop a filter system" request -
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:_Personal_Image_Hiding_Featur
e
- and it has more or less been dead in the water since then.
There's been no significant attempt to revive it, but I think this is
in part because the wounds are still fresh - I think were it to be
reopened now you'd get much the same result, a lot of heat which
eventually stalls.
It's worth noting that a very small-scale version of this is in use
for some wikis - it's been pointed out that some sexual topics on
Arabic Wikipedia have a "click to expand" field which conceals an
image - but this is pretty rare and done on a page-by-page, not
image-by-image, basis; it also has no user-level customisability.
Andrew.
On 24 July 2014 02:51, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I agree that offensiveness is in the eye of the
beholder. And while there
may be all manner of very niche groups who find strange things
offensiveness, maybe some people object to seeing refrigerators or reading
about cakes, nonetheless we know that there are a lot of widespread
categories of offensiveness that generate the bulk of discussions about
the
inclusion of items on Wikipedia or Commons.
What we could do is to have to some system of classification (like the
movies) for articles, images, and/or categories indicating that they are
potentially offensive for various reasons. Perhaps along similar lines to
the "content advisories" in IMDB, e.g.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0295297/parentalguide?ref_=tt_stry_pg
People could then put in their profiles that all classifications are
acceptable or them or that these are the classifications they don't want
to
see (e.g. Sex and Nudity, Gore and Violence,
Profanity, etc - obviously
our
classifications might not be identical to IMDB as we
are dealing with
different kinds of content but you get the idea). When that person
searches
Wikipedia or Commons, then those articles, images and
categories that they
would find offensive are not returned. When a person reads an article
containing an offensive-to-them categorised image, it is simply not
displayed or some image saying "Suppressed at your request (Sex and
Nudity)". We could possibly bundle such these finer classifications into
common collections, e.g. Inappropriate for Children, Suitable for Muslims,
or whatever, so for many people it's a simple tick-one-box.
For anonymous users or users who have not explicitly set their
preferences,
rendering of an article or image could first ask
"This article/image has
been tagged as potentially offensive for SuchAndSuch reason, click OK to
confirm you want to view it". If they are a logged-in user, it could also
offer a link to set their preferences for future use.
I note that movies are often made with variants for different countries.
Sometimes that's simply a matter of being dubbed into another language but
it can also include the deletion (or replacement) of certain scenes or
language that would be offensive in those countries. So it is not as if we
are reinventing the wheel here, just customising it to Wikipedia.
Kerry
________________________________
From: gendergap-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Kaldari
Sent: Thursday, 24 July 2014 7:11 AM
To: Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the
participationof women within Wikimedia projects.
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Sexualized environment on Commons
Personally, I don't think it's worth having a discussion here about the
merits of deleting these images. There's no chance in hell they are going
to
be deleted from Commons. What I'm more interested
in is the locker-room
nature of the discussions and how/if this can be addressed, as I think
that
is actually more likely to dissuade female
contributors than the images
themselves.
Ryan Kaldari
On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Ryan, thanks for bringing this up for discussion. I've put a lot of
thought
into the series of photos this comes from over the
years, and it's well
worth some discussion. I'd like to hear what others think about this. Here
is a link to the category for the larger collection; warning, there's lots
of nudity and sexual objectification here, so don't click if you don't
want
to see that:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_portrayals_of_computer_tech
nology
First, I agree with Ryan that in the (various) deletion discussions I've
seen around this and similar topics, there is often a toxic level of
childish and offensive comments. I think that's a significant problem, and
I
don't know what can be done to improve it.
Scolding people in those
discussions often a backfires, and serves only to amplify the offensive
commentary. But silence can imply tacit consent. How should one
participate
in the discussion, promoting an outcome one believes
in, without
contributing to or enabling the toxic nature of the discourse? I think
I've
done a decent job of walking that line in similar
discussions, but I'm
sure
there's a lot of room for better approaches. I
would love to hear what has
worked for others, here and/or privately.
Also, my initial reaction to these images is that they are inherently
offensive; my gut reaction is to keep them off Commons.
But after thinking it through and reading through a number of deletion
discussions, the conclusion I've come to (at least so far) is that the
decision to keep them (in spite of the childish and offensive commentary
along the way) is the right decision. These strike me as the important
points:
* We have a collection of more than 20 million images, intended to support
a
wide diversity of educational projects. Among those 20
million files are a
great many that would be offensive to some audience. (For instance, if I
understand correctly, *all images portraying people* are offensive to at
least some devout Muslims.)
* Were these images originally intended to promote objectification of
women?
To support insightful commentary on objectification of
women? Something
else? I can't see into the minds of their creators, but I *can* imagine
them
being put to all kinds of uses, some of which would be
worthwhile. The
intent of the photographer and models, I've come to believe, is not
relevant
to the decision. (apart from the basic issue of
consent in the next bullet
point:)
* Unlike many images on Commons, I see no reason to doubt that these were
produced by consenting adults, and intended for public distribution.
If they are to be deleted, what is the principle under which we would
delete
them? To me, that's the key question. If it's
simply the fact that we as
individuals find them offensive, I don't think that's sufficient. If it's
out of a belief that they inherently cause more harm than good, I think
the
reasons for that would need to be fleshed out before
they could be
persuasive.
Art is often meant to be provocative, to challenge our assumptions and
sensibilities, to prompt discussion. We host a lot of art on Commons. On
what basis would we delete these, but keep other controversial works of
art?
Of course it would be terrible to use these in, for
instance, a Wikipedia
article about HTML syntax. But overall, does it cause harm to simply have
them exist in an image repository? My own conclusion with regard to this
photo series is that the net value of maintaining a large and diverse
collection of media, without endorsing its contents per se., outweighs
other
considerations.
(For anybody interested in the deletion process on Commons, the kinds of
things that are deliberated, and the way the discussions go, you might be
interested in my related blog post from a couple months ago:
http://wikistrategies.net/wikimedia-commons-is-far-from-ethically-broken/ )
-Pete
[[User:Peteforsyth]]
On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
If anyone ever needs a good example of the locker-room environment on
Wikimedia Commons, I just came across this old deletion discussion:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Radio_butt
on_and_female_nude.jpg
The last two keep votes are especially interesting. One need look no
farther
than the current Main Page talk page for more of the
same (search for
"premature ejaculation").
Kaldari
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- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk