Hi all,
I saw this news item today;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8061979.stm
and felt that it was tangentially related to the discussions on this list
concerning sexual content on wikimedia - it's prompted me to make this reply
anywhoo (both the story and the comments are worth reading, and I feel they
deal with the 'baby' and 'bathwater' aspects reasonably well).
In a bid to avoid Birgitte's ignore list (the ignominy ! ;-) I thought I'd
respond to a few further comments and detail my proposals / reasoning for
good ways forward;
( see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sexual_content for details
on my proposals )
Firstly, the issue of whether or not Wikimedia should try and meet the needs
of a market, for example schools, who prefer to not display images of sexual
activity, for me is a somewhat moot - the issue is more that wikimedia's
policies in this area are not the result of careful thought, we're really
more just ended up in the status quo. It seems sensible to me to closely
examine whether or not we like that status quo, and whether or not there are
policies and practicies on various projects which should be improved. I
think we're doing some things a bit wrong, and should want to improve, as
oppose to inviting someone else to do them better. Perhaps my slightly dull,
but canonical, example of this is that I don't think it's necessary for
commons to host pictures of topless women, taken at the beach, without their
permission - this sort of user genearted content is a net detriment to the
project in my view. I'd be interested to hear if anyone disputes this
specific asasertion.
My 'proposal 1' is that sexual content be restricted from userspace - I
concur with Jimbo (
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=prev&o…)
that an image of shaven genitalia is inappropriate on a userpage
My 'proposal 2' in the linked page is broadly synonymous with the technical
implementation discussed by Brion previously - the addition of some sort of
soft 'opt in' / age verification requirement seems a bit of a no-brainer to
me - I had an interesting chat recently with someone who was insistent that
the lack of such means Wikimedia is technically breaking UK and Australian
law - I have no idea as to the veracity of this (or whether it matters!) -
but am interested in the ideas and opinions of those more cluey in this
area.
My 'proposal 3' suggests that we need to apply more rigour in checking the
model releases and licensing - basically we're just too easy to game at the
moment, and various mischievous souls have delighted in leading various
communities up garden paths in the past - what's interesting is some
community's willingness to be somewhat complicit in this process (the 'we
must assume good faith, so yeah - this image is clearly fine' problem - the
burden of evidence is all wrong in my book).
Those antipodeans who've heard be chat about this at Wiki Wed. here in
Sydney may be interested to hear that there is some follow up interest in
this topic in general, and I may be boring more folk on this subject with a
nattily written post on a Fairfax blog - I'm particularly keen at the moment
to try and discern whether or not it's possible to move forward in any way
on this issue, or whether or not we're sort of stuck in the bed we've made
to date.... all thoughts and ideas most welcome... :-)
cheers,
Peter
PM.
The licensing update poll has been tallied.
"Yes, I am in favor of this change" : 13242 (75.8%)
"No, I am opposed to this change" : 1829 (10.5%)
"I do not have an opinion on this change" : 2391 (13.7%)
Total ballots cast and certified: 17462
Additional information and background is available at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Result
The WMF Board has reacted positively to this result, though they have
not yet made a final decision.
-Robert Rohde
For the Licensing Update Committee
Ziko wrote:
"Nearly all already existing initiatives for open teaching materials use the
CC-NC-SA, the Creative Commons license that prohibits commercial use. I was
told that you cannot explain to teachers why others should have the right to
commercially exploit their work..."
What a great news! All those wat too expensive school teachers that
are a burden to the Dutch taxpayer voluntarily move to become
volunteer teachers. Please pass the champaign on this. Let's
celebrate!
Where is Mike Godwin our legal counselor. I really need a terrier
preparing a big law suit on this. Just in case a single teacher would
have the guts to accept a pay check while using CC-NC-SA material in
class.
Why? That is my interpretation of 'commercial': making directly money
while using the material. Article 4c of CC-NC-SA is very clear about
this: "You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You in
Section 3 above in any manner that is primarily intended for or
directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary
compensation." Even Dutch teachers can be instructed to read aloud the
last three words "private monetary compensation."
So far, so good for the first part of the defense, thank you Mike.
That was only the part concerning the selfish and myopic Dutch
teachers. Now for the second part, to open their eyes. Primary and
secondary education might perform a whole range of goals, and a tiny
little one of them is to prepare kids for a future role as income
earning participants in society (deliberately not specifying in which
way). Having been educated with CC-NC-SA materials those poor kids
will not be allowed to make any money with the knowledge thus
gathered. This contradicts at least one of the primary goals of
education.
What the Dutch teachers want sounds all too much like wanting to get
direct monetary compensation at the taxpayers expense up front for
creating the teaching materials *and* failing to deliver the materials
(distribute it to who paid for it, the taxpayers, that is the public
at large, so distribute it freely) *and* looking for ways to collect
royalties without repaying the expenses paid up front.
A great counter example is the image project. The WMF has paid for the
creation of content (imagery) with the explicition condition the
material is freely licensed. If the Dutch minister is going to pay 385
million euro annually for the creation of content without requiring
the material to be freely licensed, he is f***ing nuts.
Dedalus
--- On Fri, 5/15/09, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not censored (was Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, May 15, 2009, 7:53 PM
> The argument against concealing or
> making it more difficult in any way
> to access material is that it inevitably amounts to
> censorship. In my
> youth, one could not receive publications--on any
> subject--through the
> mail from the Communist countries without signing a form
> that one had
> requested them; I remember doing this for photography
> magazines from
> Poland. For adult web sites today, one must click, and the
> click is
> recorded. Even though Wikipedia does not record views in
> an
> attributable manner, a log on the computer used to access
> it could do
> so.
> Further, a person looking at a sexual image now can say if
> challenged
> that it appeared by accident; if a setting had to be
> enabled, to see
> them, that wouldn't be possible.
>
>
> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
That is true if the default is click-through. An opt-in click through feature would not take the accidental argument away. There is certainly a way to design such a feature to address the concerns you list. I believe the real problem with such a feature is in content selection. There are always the boderline cases and who puts in the work to sort it out, someone will unhappy with the decisions (in both directions) and complaining about the management of it all. And also the time delay factor, as things are being contstantly changed. If we advertise that we have such a feature and people sign-up for it and it is only 80% effective, we may suffer more loss of goodwill then if we don't offer a "safe" option at all. Passively not meeting people's expectations is much better outcome than actively setting their expectaions to a certaiin level and then failing to meet them.
Birgitte SB
I'm splitting off a separate thread about long-term archiving. The
original thread is important enough not to derail it.
This is a big topic, and also one that has been addressed in many
different bodies of planning and literature. The Long Now foundation
has considered a 10,000-year library project, and their Rosetta
Project tests a technique for 5,000-year preservation of texts.
Sadly, an earlier forum devoted to these ideas has been taken offline,
robots.txt'ed out of the internet archive, and I can't find a copy...
[ a long now apparently doesn't require archival public discussion? :)
]
Kevin Kelly on long-term backups:
http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/
The original y2k event:
http://www.longnow.org/projects/past-events/10klibrary/
Related research into long-term archival engineering has turned up
good ideas: laser micro-etching into nickel provides an excellent
price/size/weight point per archived page, and requires only the
[re]creation of decent, bootstrappable optics to recover lost
knowledge.
You could create and distribute etched-plate copies of the 10B words
of all Wikimedia text [and thumbnails?] on perhaps 100 thin nickel
sheets, for roughly $100k / 50kg / 0.01 m^3 (incl padding). If this
laser etching process were scaled up, it would drop significantly in
price.
SJ
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/5/4 Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu>:
>> It seems to me that you are joking, but I was seriously thinking about
>> cooperating with the Long Now project on long term preservation of Wikipedia.
>
> No joke, I thing the long term preservation of knowledge is a very worthy cause.
>
>> Printing Wikipedia on acid-free paper every year or at least decade in several
>> copies dispersed on several continents should ensure that the contents last
>> for several centuries at least. It wouldn't be prohibitively expensive either
>> and it could gather some media attention (= sponsors).
>
> Acid-free paper won't last for several centuries without decent
> storage, and we're talking about a small library worth of paper. (See
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes - and that's
> just the English Wikipedia. Include other languages and other projects
> and you have a very sizeable amount of content.) That kind of storage
> isn't particularly cheap. Air tight containers in a cave might work
> pretty well though - caves have very stable temperature, and the air
> tight containers would control humidity - and the caves already exist
> so no need to spend money constructing somewhere.
>
>> For a really long term, a cooperation with some brickworks, where a brick
>> printer would be introductd in the brick producing process, so that Wikipedia
>> (and other important works) would be printed on every brick produced. We know
>> that Sumerian tablets have lasted for thousands of years, so these bricks
>> would surely last that long too.
>>
>> And for even longer, do the same with bottle manufacturers.
>
> Yeah, bits and pieces would survive a long time, but you wouldn't get
> any significant portion of the projects saved that way. If you got it
> written on bricks that were being used to build a building you have
> good reason to believe will be around a long time, then it might work,
> but you would need a lot of bricks.
>
> According to the page I linked to above, the English Wikipedia has
> 7,484,527,350 characters. Let's assume an 8pt font (any smaller and it
> becomes difficult to write or read easily) on a standard brick (which
> Wikipedia tells me is, in the UK, 215mm by 65mm), that's about 18
> lines of text and maybe 17 words per line. That's about 300 words per
> brick (I'm assuming only one face will be written on). That works out
> at 25 million bricks. That's well over 1000 typical houses just for
> one copy of one project. Since the vast majority of these bricks
> aren't going to survive you are going to want massive redundancy. I
> don't think it is practical.
>
> Engraving on bottles isn't going to work - the bottles will
> (hopefully!) get recycled.
Hello,
Maybe this is interesting for Wikimedians too, certainly for Wikibookians.
The Dutch ministry of education is going to set up "Wikiwijs", a project to
develop provide open and free school books or teaching materials to Dutch
schools. In the elections the parties promised to abolish parents' payments
for school books, and now the government has to cope with the costs.
On a seminar in Amersfoort at Friday it became obvious that many questions
are still unanswered. Wikiwijs is intended to be a platform for
collaboratively developping teachings materials, but also link to already
existing materials (also commercial ones). Although a letter of the minister
to the parliament said that only teachers will be able to edit on Wikiwijs,
now this remains to be discussed.
Kennisnet (a government foundation known to Wikimedians because it supported
Wikipedia with technological help) and the Open University are commissioned
to create Wikiwijs. The man from the Open University admitted that Wikiwijs
will not work like a wiki, and Marjon Bakker from Wikimedia Nederland asked
him why the name is Wikiwijs then. (But on many occasions the minister and
others compared Wikiwijs to Wikipedia - are they exploiting our good name?)
The organisation of Dutch high schools wants to set up a different project.
This has to do a lot with the distribution of power between the agents in
the educational system in the Netherlands, and also within the schools.
Nearly all already existing initiatives for open teaching materials use the
CC-NC-SA, the Creative Commons license that prohibits commercial use. I was
told that you cannot explain to teachers why others should have the right to
commercially exploit their work...
The project manager of the organisation of Dutch high schools gave me a very
striking reason against a license that allows commercial use: Most of the
teachers want to teach with the help of ordinary school books, with
additional material taken from the internet. They want to have something on
paper. If the school book publishers are allowed to make print versions from
open content, then the teachers want those print versions. They will put
pressure on their head masters to buy them, and then the shift from print to
digital will not occur, and the plan of the organisation to save 385
millions € will not become reality. So, the manager says, the better if the
publishers cannot sell print versions.
Ziko van Dijk
read more in German on
http://groups.google.de/group/infobrief-wiki-welt/msg/21c9f6c00634d13c?
--
Ziko van Dijk
NL-Silvolde
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ave Maria Mõistlik <avjoska(a)yahoo.com>
Date: 2009/5/18
Subject: Fw: Embassies sponsor article-writing contests in three languages
To: foundation-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hello,
I want Foundation members to know this:
>From April 4 to May 4 2009 a competition in writing Norway-related articles
was held in the Estonian language version of the international on-line
encyclopedia Wikipedia, written by volunteers. The competition was supported
by the Norwegian Embassy to Estonia. At the same time, a parallel
competition for writing Estonia-related articles ran in the Nynorsk and
Bokmål versions of Wikipedia, supported by the Estonian Embassy to Norway.
This is the first time that embassies have supported a competition in
Wikipedia. The original idea of the competition came from Mr Ulf Larsen, who
works in Norway and lives in Estonia.
Over the course of the competition, 216 new articles on Estonia were written
in Bokmål, 202 new articles were written in Nynorsk. Forty users of the
Estonian Wikipedia managed to write or edit 768 articles in one month. 623
of those articles were written from scratch during this competition. This
great number was very surprising for the jury.
Most articles written in the Estonian language concern the geography and
history of Norway. There was also interest in Norwegian literature, art and
cinema.
Winners in Estonian language version of Wikipedia:
Metsavend, main prize
Geonarva, special prize for geography of Norway
WooteleF, special prize for cultural heritage and history of Norway
Mona, special prize for culture of Norway
Changeant, special prize for a newcomer
Winners in the Norwegian Nynorsk version of Wikipedia:
Eirik, main prize, for the article about Estonia
Frokor, best extended article
Egil Arne, best new contributor
Winners in the Norwegian Bokmål/Riksmål version of Wikipedia:
> Bjoertvedt, main prize, for the article about Estonias economy
> Orzada, best extended article, History of Estonia
> Harald Hansen, best extended article, Estonia's defence
> Naunet, best new contributor, Estonian song festival
> Fredag25, best new contributor, Erkki-Sven Tüür
> Jpfagerback and Orzada, best co-operated article, Estonia's foreign
relations
Link for news:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Avjoska/Parallel_article_writing_contest_…
Pic of people in Norway: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gruppebilde.JPG
Greetings from Tallinn, Estonia!
Ave Maria
(User:Avjoska)
--
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler(a)gmail.com
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8051262.stm
Google has an hour of slow service and it's headline news. Imagine the
donations we could get if our downtime (which, as David is fond of
saying, is our most profitable product) got into the headlines!
Perhaps we should take to issuing press releases following server
problems.
--- On Fri, 5/15/09, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not censored (was Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery
> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Date: Friday, May 15, 2009, 1:46 PM
> On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 1:44 PM,
> Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb(a)yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > I think this email really shows a misunderstanding of
> "Wikipedia is not censored" is about; so I am starting a new
> thread to discuss the issue.
>
> Well, for my part, I think the entire "Wikipedia is not
> censored"
> policy completely misunderstands what censorship is and why
> it's bad.
> It's being used as an epithet, like calling someone a Nazi
> if they
> propose more regulation. The policy as implemented
> today is IMO
> partly a matter of pushing libertarian social values on all
> viewers
> whether they like them or not.
Well I think that is more of an argument against misuse of the charge of censorship than an argument that censorship should be embraced. I agree people misuse it, rather than have a meaningful discussion. But to reply that "Wikipedia *is* censored" just plays into the hand of the those who do not want to discuss the issue.
> > Censorship is deciding to withhold information for the
> purpose of keeping people (in some cases particular groups
> of people like children or non-members) uninformed. It is
> not simply choosing the least offensive image of human feces
> to use from equally informative options.
>
> Absolutely. The key characteristic of censorship is
> that it keeps
> people uninformed of things they want to know about.
> It's therefore
> not censorship to permit people to not read things they
> *don't* want
> to see, and it's not censorship to ask for confirmation
> before showing
> people something. Censorship would be if I advocated
> the deletion of
> offensive images. I don't. I advocate making
> them one extra click
> away for people who don't want to see them inline.
>
> > This is something I said on-wiki years ago during a
> particular clash between "Wikipedia is not censored" and a
> group of people being offended:
> >
> > "I never take an action for the purpose of causing
> offense. However I am certain people can be offended for a
> number of reasons by things I have done or said. I find this
> to be unfortunate but unavoidable. As far as Wikipedia goes
> it, there are a number of policies and guidelines here which
> help us navigate different cultural norms. I do my best to
> rely on these as well as precedent here over my own gut
> instinct of what I find personally acceptable. When WP norms
> lead to people being offended; I do think we should try to
> mitigate this as much as this is possible without
> compromising the core principle of providing *free
> encyclopedic content*. In this case little can done unless
> another freely licensed image is found. I would very much
> prefer to see these garments on a dress form or mannequin
> rather than live models. Not because the models offend me
> personally, but because I think live models make the photo
> more offensive to Mormons without adding
> > anything encyclopedic over the same picture on a
> dress form."
>
> I think we agree on this, but perhaps I go a little further
> than you.
> The key point is that if we can avoid offending people
> *without*
> reducing the information available in the encyclopedia,
> that's a
> worthy goal. If a Chinese partisan is offended by
> [[Tiananmen Square
> protests of 1989]] because it portrays the Chinese
> government in a
> negative light, then too bad -- the facts require that we
> portray it
> in a negative light. If a Christian is offended by
> [[Penis]] because
> it contains a picture of a penis, on the other hand,
> accommodation is
> possible without compromising our mission. For
> instance, we might
> choose to put all images of penises "below the fold", and
> post a
> warning at the top. The amount of information
> actually *lost* is
> zero. It becomes marginally harder to access, but
> only very slightly,
> so if we can avoid offending a lot of people, it would be
> worth it.
>
> But this idea is generally rejected on enwiki because it's
> "censorship". I haven't seen any reasonable
> justification for why
> this form of "censorship" (which it isn't by the common
> definition of
> the word) is actually a bad thing.
>
I can agree with your point here. But the problem is that censorship, by it's true definition, is a real issue. We can't dismiss the real issue, just because some people conflate it with "inconvenience".
> > The key concept behind "Wikipedia is not censored" is
> that Wikipedia provides free encyclopedic content. So long
> as that underlying goal of providing encyclopedic
> information is met then we are not censoring. When we
> decide that certain information should simply not be
> available to people we are censoring. When we decide that
> a particular image does not inform people on the subject any
> better than another, or that the subject is not notable,
> then we are not censoring. Merely removing an image or not
> having it in the first place is not necessarily proof that
> Wikipedia is censored.
>
> What about requiring an extra click for those who haven't
> opted in to
> see sexual images? Or even only for those who have
> opted *out*? Is
> that against Wikipedia's mission, and if so, why?
I don't think it is against our mission and I am open-minded about a solution along those lines. But I haven't yet seen a practical proposal for implementation of such a feature (on the workings of the content selection side) that I could support. It has to manageable. I can't support creating another backlog that no one is willing to dedicate the time to resolve. Saying "Everyone can just flag stuff and work out the conflict" doesn't mean they are likely to do it. Look at the backlogs on NPOV and Accuracy disputes.
>
> > That said I am certain that there are articles on
> Wikipedia that are censored, just as there are biased
> articles and false articles. Wikipedia has never been
> perfect in the application of it's ideals.
>
> Does that imply that you believe [[Goatse.cx]] should in
> fact have an
> above-the-fold illustration of its subject matter, or
> not? If not,
> how is that any different from [[Penis]]? And if so .
> . . well, I
> think you're in the minority here.
In all honesty, I don't really know. I generally find the argument over non-free content to be not worth having, because it takes the long-range mission out of the picture. I am frankly, apathetic about whether Wikipedia even has an *article* on goatse.cx and other internet memes. I wouldn't create the article or add to it. But I wouldn't argue to remove the image if we had either.
I would much rather formulate guidelines over the articles the are more inherently meaningful to more people. Like STD's or even [[Kama Sutra]]. Then evaluate [[Goatse.cx]] by those guidelines and see where it falls. I think focusing on what is meaningful rather than sensational will leads to better results.
Birgitte SB
g'day all,
There's an interesting deletion discussion taking place here;
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Sexuality_…
concerning an image of a woman with sperm on her neck. To my mind it's very
doubtful that this is in fact a freely licensed image, but regardless of my
cynicism, the IP who nominated the image for deletion (the 5th time it's
been nominated, and the 4th time was by me, in December) raised the
possibility that we (both commons, wikipedia, and perhaps by extension all
wmf projects) might be better to opt for drawings rather than photographs of
sexual activity?
I'm sure many are familiar with my view that the foundation is an acutely
irresponsible host in this area (I'm not a fan, for example, of the pictures
taken of topless women on beaches without their permission which commons
currently hosts) - but wonder what the feeling is out there in regard to
freely licensed images of people having sex - we've currently got quite a
few on commons, and it's likely to be a growth area. There's a dirty pun in
there somewhere, but I can't be bothered to make it......
cheers,
Peter
PM.
