Pete,
I don't know which Commons you participate in. The one I know has tons of
nude pictures of women uploaded by anonymous throwaway accounts, with no
indication whatsoever that the women concerned are aware of and have
consented to the upload, or indeed that the images are public domain.
It took me one minute to find the uploads of this user:
Please nominate all of them for deletion. I will be interested in watching
how what goes.
The problem with "identifiable" is that when someone posts revenge porn on
Commons, it matters not one jot whether the face of the woman performing
whatever sex act is depicted is visible or not. It is enough for the former
boyfriend to tell everyone in his and his ex-girlfriend's social circle on
Facebook or wherever about the image to ruin her life.
Andreas
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 9:36 PM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 12:19 AM, Erik Moeller
<erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 10:43 PM, Sarah
<slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
A similar statement from the Foundation about the
need to reject racism,
sexism and homophobia among editors -- and to remember that this is an
educational project -- might go a long way to adjusting attitudes.
<snip>
In response to issues with the ethical management
of photographs the
WMF Board did in fact pass a resolution specifically about photographs
of identifiable people:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Images_of_identifiable_peop…
Erring on the side of conservatism, the Board used language about
"private situations / places". But it
calls explicitly for
strengthening and developing the relevant policy on Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_peop…
There _are_ thoughtful people on Commons who could be engaged
individually to help further develop and refine this policy to
elaborate on ethical issues like the one which started this thread.
And there are thoughtful people on this list who could help drive that
conversation.
I think some discussion of the outcomes of this resolution might be
productive. As a frequent participant in deletion decisions on Wikimedia
Commons, my very strong sense is that we do well at complying with the
letter of that particular resolution resolution. In my experience, when
somebody nominates an unclothed photo of a clearly identifiable subject for
deletion, and there is no evidence of the person's consent, the file is
generally deleted without any particular resistance.
Unfortunately, this leaves two major gaps: (1) cases where reasonable
people could and do disagree about whether or not somebody is identifiable,
and (2) cases where those concerned about the subject find a particular
photo problematic irrespective of whether or not he or she is identifiable.
I believe the Board acted with very good intentions with that resolution,
but there is an unintended consequence that identifiability has become the
focus of many of these discussions. I think board action to address this
problem would be welcome and effective; but I would hope that new language
be carefully considered and vetted before passage to try to anticipate and
avoid further undesirable consequences.
It's also worth noting on the subject of Commons that WMF did _not_
withdraw the Controversial Content resolution from May 2011, only the
personal image hiding feature component thereof. The resolution also
contained other recommendations consistent with reinforcing the
educational scope of Wikimedia Commons:
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content
"We urge the Commons community to continue to practice rigorous active
curation of content, including applying appropriate categorization,
removing media that does not meet existing policies and guidelines for
inclusion, and actively commissioning media that is deemed needed but
missing. We urge the community to pay particular attention to curating
all kinds of potentially controversial content, including determining
whether it has a realistic educational use and applying the principle
of least astonishment in categorization and placement."
"We urge the Wikimedia Foundation and community to work together in
developing and implementing further new tools for using and curating
Commons, to make the tasks of reviewing, deleting, categorizing,
uploading and using images easier.
In my view, this resolution missed the biggest area of opportunity, which
can be done by anyone: to develop essays, guidelines, or policies on
Commons that describe common scenarios, and outline effective outcomes.
Those of us processing deletion nominations on Commons are drinking from a
firehose; by my estimation, every day has dozens of nominations, some days
well over 100. There are probably 5-10 regular participants and
administrators processing these, with others dropping in more occasionally.
The key lesson in that is that carefully phrased nominations that make
reference to policies and guidelines tend to be more successful than those
that, for instance, include words like "obviously." It is not uncommon for
files that clearly violate various policies to be kept, simply because the
nomination is vague or confusing, and would require more time to consider
than we have resources for.
Closely related to this, though, is a really good software development
opportunity. It's not exciting and would not grab any headlines, but it
would make a big difference: if the workflow for processing deletion
requests were made smoother, those engaging in it could get more done,
spending more time considering each request and less time clicking buttons,
typing code, etc; and if it were made more transparent and better
documented (including useful links built into wiki pages and templates), it
would be easier for new people (say, those from this list) to get involved
and help process the nominations.
If you're interested in this topic, you might want to look through this
list of notes and links I've kept on my Commons user page. Not all are
relevant to this discussion, but many are:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Peteforsyth#Interesting_stuff
Finally, in response to Sarah's message -- I will certainly try to watch
for an announcement about the Privacy Policy rewrite and post to this list
when it happens!
-Pete
[[User:Peteforsyth]]
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