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@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@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_technology
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@wikimedia.org>
wrote: