I'm going to add my voice to the "yeah, that wasn't cool".  To give a bit of an anecdote, John Vandenberg and I were doing a demonstration of Commons to some librarians and cultural curators yesterday, and it was a bit of a rude shock seeing that particular image on the frontpage.  One of the more elderly contributors remarked on it to me privately in a negative sense afterwards, all I could do was look embarassed and say "Yes, it's a bit of a racy image, isn't it.  Can't imagine how anyone thought that would be a good idea".  That's probably one contributor who won't be beating a path to our door in the future.

And, at the risk of editorialising here, those who are responding to this criticism by claiming that we're asking for "censorship" or that the freedom to plaster graphic images over the Commons frontpage is a battle for liberty along the lines of the fight against slavery or for universal suffrage... need to take an aspirin and have a good lie down.  Nobody is claiming that such images are not within Commons' scope; they quite clearly are, just like pictures of penises, medical procedures, and other images that people might find unpleasant are.  Should they be in scope for the main page though?  I don't think so, the same as a picture of a genital piercing, Osama bin Laden's bloodied corpse, or other pictures that could possibly cause innocent people to get in trouble should be out of main page scope.  As a community, I think most of us are mature enough to apply a common sense test to these things, and common sense would indicate that that image was likely to be one that would cause needless offense to people and hurt the project.

Cheers,
Craig





On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Tobias Oelgarte <tobias.oelgarte@googlemail.com> wrote:
If we buy this contributions with a loss of liberty. Then yes. Nothing is as worthy as liberty.

Am 17.05.2011 10:22, schrieb Gnangarra:
Is this picture worth more than 137,000 news images,
Is this picture worth the loss of xontributions from GLAM organisations
Is this picture worth the cost of denying other contributors the opportunity to participate.

On 17 May 2011 16:16, Tobias Oelgarte <tobias.oelgarte@googlemail.com> wrote:
Am 17.05.2011 02:34, schrieb Neil Kandalgaonkar:
> On 5/16/11 8:21 PM, Cary Bass wrote:
>> We need an active group of contributors who represent at the very least
>> some cross-section of not only Commons contributors but of interested
>> re-users of Commons content to actively monitor and maintain the POTD.
>> This is not the first time that something inappropriate for Main Page
>> content has appeared and I doubt it will be the last.
> That is definitely a practical solution. POTD are scheduled long in
> advance, so that could solve the problems here pretty quickly. The image
> in question is, IMO, unambiguously inappropriate for Commons, and this
> shouldn't have been a difficult debate.
>
> On the other hand it feels a bit wrong to me. In that case we're asking
> groups that are relatively underrepresented in Wiki culture to take on
> the role of policing. I feel like they ought to have some rights to a
> welcoming environment as a baseline. That said, in a wiki context, it
> seems to be impossible to achieve such baseline freedoms, as long as the
> offenders have large amounts of free time.
>
> So some people are going to have to make the sacrifices to change the
> culture.
>
> Another worry: if there's a "quality control board", officially or
> unofficially, they can start to take that role too seriously or become
> captured by various radical factions. But I guess we have to take that
> chance.
>
>
Another board for decisions? Just leave the communities alone. They can
handle it very well on their own. Any board i know failed in so many
points. An good example from the German Wikipedia is the
"Schiedsgericht". This is the last call if some users can't be stopped
from offending each other. But this board isn't trusted at all and
constantly breaks down. Just because it is seen as needless.

What im seeing here is the construction of an government which isn't
even democratic, getting very close to a dictatorship. Or as we said in
the GDR: One party, elected by itself.

Tobias

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