On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 1:39 AM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 9:05 AM, Pete Forsyth
<peteforsyth(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
The point of I'm trying to make in this
discussion is, we
do a lot more good by focusing on what's working, and then expanding on
that, than we do by getting all accusatory about
the things that are
*not*
working.
Think of a surgeon who's done thousands of successful routine operations.
But every once in a while, he does a gastric bypass, and those patients
more often than not end up harmed.
It isn't appropriate in such a case to "focus on what's working".
(And such accusations often seem to be
accompanied by an
unjustified assumption that the bad somehow outweighs the good.)
The question isn't whether the bad outweighs the good.
Andreas,
I agree with your more sophisticated concerns about what is going on.
However, I think it's really important to put them in context. If Wikimedia
Commons had existed in 1985, this would be a very compelling line of
criticism. But in 2014, the same kind of issues -- occasionally
encountering shockingly inappropriate images on occasion -- happens whether
you are using Wikimedia Commons, Google search, Flickr, Instagram, or any
number of other sites -- not to mention spam that arrives unbidden in your
email box. If there are studies that quantify how often this happens in
different contexts, I'm not aware of them (and would be very happy to learn
about them). Until we can look at that kind of study, I refuse to accept as
a premise that Commons is categorically worse than other broad collections
of media on the Internet.
This is a problem to be addressed, yes. And it is a problem that the
Commons community works to address (at least in incremental fashion) every
single day. But in my opinion, it is not a problem to panic about.
Pete
[[User:Peteforsyth]]