Karl A. Krueger wrote:
On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 07:24:35PM +0800, John Lee wrote:
What's your problem with letting others disable the viewing of certain images for themselves?
I fully support end-users using whatever systems are at their disposal to avoid seeing images that they do not want to see. Those systems are chiefly at the client end, and include goofy censorware programs as well as working facilities such as turning images off in the browser before you open up an article whose title suggests that it might traumatize your poor innocent eyebulbs.
The problem is these are all far too fuzzy, either catching too few unwanted images or too many wanted ones. Most of them don't provide easy access to the images should it be decided they are desirable, either. For example, even if some censorware did figure out all images on [[autofellatio]] should be blocked and didn't do the same for a random bunch of unrelated Wikipedia articles, it's hard to disable it for images the reader wants to view (i.e. they may not mind an illustration, but a photograph would be undesirable).
The problem is you are still viewing this as an attempt to bowdlerise Wikipedia so it's suitable for consumption by right-wing wackos or the underaged. It will never be. This is an attempt to give readers fine control over what they are viewing, prevent unnecessary distraction (images like the one originally on autofellatio distract too much from the article for people not used to nudity, even if they aren't offended by it) and at the same time (this is a side benefit: something nice to have, but not the main pillar of the argument) taking a little bit of sting out of accusations that Wikipedia is offensive.
Let's try summaring your stance:
The core of my position is really simple: There isn't really a problem.
The status quo regarding images is actually working extremely well. Gratuitous (uninformative) images do get removed or replaced, especially those gratuitous images that also offend some people.
The problem is, these cases are beginning to take up a great deal of editors' time, as Raul654 pointed out in his quote from my earlier email. We should be building an encyclopedia, not squabbling over these details. Putting the decision in readers' hands means the issue is out of our hands. Sure, if we go on with the status quo, these crappy images will disappear. They just disappear after reams of discussion, maybe a few blocks, and God knows what else.
At the same time, censorious editors are not allowed to vandalize Wikipedia by deleting or concealing informative images just because they are offended by caterpillars or clitorises.
Good.
This is all as it should be. As the community gains more experience and precedent cases, and more understanding of what to watch for in order to detect vandalism (of either kind) it will become easier rather than harder.
Somehow I doubt that. Rarely things get solved without something official. Michael and Wik have caused a lot of problems, and nothing was solved until Jimbo or the arbcom stepped in. We got trapped in this autofellatio quagmire as well even though we already knew from the clitoris dispute that this would occur.
Because that is what your (and others') "filtering" proposals are. They are not really about making Wikipedia "safe" or "inoffensive", since those goals have been demonstrated to be impossible. (As long as Wikipedia is an editable wiki, there is no way to provide assurances that it is inoffensive. As long as it is NPOV, there is no way to decide _whose_ offense shall be considered significant. And those who really militate against "indecency" and the like, in law and public policy, are offended by text just as much as by images.)
So because it's impossible, we should never try to strive for it?
It's possible to do a remarkable amount of harm while pursuing unreachable goals.
True.
I don't think you actually understood what I wrote, though, so I'll try to spell it out a little more clearly:
- As long as Wikipedia is a wiki, bozos and jerks can put "offensive"
content into it. Vandalism may not last long, but it does not have to. Therefore, we can _never_ provide a guarantee that any given article will not have goatse on it. And thus, Wikipedia will _never_ be suitable for classrooms where such a guarantee is required.
Absolutely.
- As long as Wikipedia has an NPOV policy, there is no way to decide
whose view of what is "offensive" shall be used for labeling. Some people are offended by sex, some by violence, some by caterpillars, and some get seizures from viewing [[moire]] images.
Therefore, any labeling of selected categories as "potentially offensive" is an NPOV violation and unacceptable on that regard.
I refer you to the argument regarding disambiguation pages that has already been discussed by others on this list. Roughly, it goes like this: [[NSA]] leads to the National Security Association and not the National Stuttering Association or any other particular article or even the disambiguation page (although that would be the most NPOV) for the sake of readers' convenience. It's not POV and actually inconveniencing for those of us looking for other articles (imagine , but it's accepted because the cost to benefit ratio is not that severe.
Here's an example of how not automatically using disambiguation pages where there's more than one related article (this example's just theoretical; to the best of my knowledge it has never occured) is POV: Let's say the article [[Greenwar]] is about this organisation opposed to Greenpeace's environmentalism (assume Greenwar is as well-known and prevalent as Greenpeace). However, we also maintain an article about an organisation of the same name that is pro-environmentalism (they just favour violent methods of protest). Now, what do we do? People looking for the article about the pro-environmentalism organisation will be pissed off. Replacing [[Greenwar]] with a disambiguation page is the most neutral solution, but it's simply unfair since most people will be looking for the anti-environmentalism organisation.
- Your and others' proposals for image censorship have been defended in
part on the grounds that people will dislike or distrust Wikipedia because it contains images that offend them. However, this is as true of text as it is of images.
Some people, for instance, consider the sentence "Dave (age ten) and Joe (age twelve) had sex" to be child pornography, just as some people believe that a drawing can be child pornography. I believe that sentence might even be illegal to publish in some jurisdictions.
That's just a side benefit (IMO) as I already pointed out. However, I have also pointed out before that photographs have more psychological impact than illustrations, which have more psychological impact than text (just try asking a psychologist). Therefore, a good deal of people offended (or at least annoyed) by the photo formerly at [[autofellatio]] probably wouldn't feel the same way about text.
We should never try to please extreme right- nor left-wingers, because such a thing is simply impossible. But for those leaning to the centre (I generally have my centre-right father in mind), it's not the text so much as the photographs that disturb them.
Therefore, the need for any system for image censorship implies the need for a system for text censorship. I personally suspect that text censorship would drive off a lot of editors and would harm Wikipedia greatly.
Obviously. Taking things to an extreme is a very, very bad thing (even with NPOV, which is why for very prevalent things, we do not have a disambiguation article but the article of the thing most people will want to view). I have never argued for catering to the whim of extremists. That's stupid. There is no reason why we shouldn't filter certain images, though.
Wikipedia can never be guaranteed to be safe for viewing, but we can _try_ to stem it. The proposal will not even affect users who explicitly declare they refuse filtering, so what's the fuss?
Censorship by default is still censorship, and still is an imposition of someone's POV as to what is "offensive" or not. If you block clitorises by default and don't block caterpillars, then you're offending against those who find caterpillars more objectionable than clitorises.
Refer to the argument regarding disambiguation. It's the cost to benefit ratio we're talking about here: You're extremely far more likely to find someone damn pissed to be looking at a photograph of a clitoris than to find someone damn pissed to be looking at a photograph of a caterpillar. Of course, the latter's opinion has to be respected, which is why we have an NPOV policy (we don't ever present as fact an opinion almost everyone has). But in minor cases like this...
Besides, it's not really an imposition of someone's POV as to what is offensive. It's an editorial decision about what images would be potentially offensive or greatly distractive to a substantial amount of people. Just like the decision to disambiguate or to house a certain article at a certain title is an editorial decision about what content a substantial portion of people would be looking for.
Here's how to make an image-filtering system that is NPOV by design:
- All images are treated equally by default -- either displayed, or not
displayed. Thus, the system does not incorporate any POV biases such as the idea that nudity is "offensive" and caterpillars are not.
I do not entertain the idea of such extremist pandering to NPOV. By virtue of that logic, we might as well host a disambiguation page at [[Chicago]] even though almost everyone will be looking for [[Chicaago, Illinois]].
- IF the system blocks all images by default: Both anonymous and
logged-in users are able to display all images. The system does not violate WikiNature by incorporating a bias against anonymous users.
If we are to not discriminate against anons (although we already do so in extremely minor things like date formatting, colour scheme, etc.), that can be done with a cookie, although people who disable cookies would be disenfranchised. (It's still just a tradeoff almost exactly like the traditional disambiguation page tradeoff).
- The system does not include any hard-coded categories reflecting the
POV of its creators. It uses the flexible Wikipedia category system. Editors who contribute images are encouraged to categorize them topically. "Uncategorized images" becomes a virtual category, which can also be selected.
Er...I thought we *were* going to use the Wikipedia category system.
- Existing NPOV policy is applied in full force to categories. This
means that it is a violation of Wikipedia policy to create categories such as "images appropriate for children" or "images of sexual perversions". Editors who do so persistently are treated the same as any other systematic POV-pushers.
Agreed.
Although such a system would not be an NPOV violation, it would still be (A) prone to abuse, and (B) prone to cause NPOV conflicts among editors.
Of course it would be prone to cause conflicts, because it flies in the face of common sense (the first requirement, I mean). The trouble is as Wikipedia grows, we seem to have a penchant for relying on legalistic issues. Instead of having a general policy of "reverting except for vandalism is bad" we need to have the 3RR which is easily gamed. Instead of having a policy on personal attacks, we have to go through the whole merry-go-round of RFC, RFM and RFAr.
Moreover, it is not necessary, as Wikipedia's present editing regime works great for dealing with the images which are most commonly cited as problematic, that is, the _uninformative_ "offensive" ones.
Problems like these are going to crop up more often over the years, and I am pessimistic that more than a very few editors will learn the lessons of this debate. When the community is divided like hell on this (in other words, you would need hell to freeze over before obtaining anything even resembling consensus), we need something to defuse the situation.
What works today probably won't work tomorrow. The question we must always ask regarding policy should be "Is it scalable?" Wikipedia is a hundred times smaller than MSN today. It won't be that way in a few years if we keep growing at this pace. Everything in place will need to be able to cope with problems a hundred times larger than they are now, and a hundred times more problems than they deal with now.
Of course, if a scalable policy is detrimental to things in the short-term, it can be delayed. We should never be afraid of questioning the status quo, though, and right now, a good number of people don't think the status quo will work for us when everything is a hundred times bigger than it is now.
Thus, it is _possible_ to have an NPOV-safe image-filtering system. But it would be a constant struggle to *keep* it NPOV-safe.
Of course it would be when such a system would make not using a disambiguation page on [[Chicago]] taboo.
Moreover, such a system is not what censorship advocates seem to want, and in any event it would not improve Wikipedia.
Of course, because it flies in the face of common sense. Extremist solutions always do that (it's the reason why pure capitalism/communism and pure totalitarianism/anarchy will never ever work).
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])