Am 21.09.2011 18:41, schrieb Andrew Gray:
On 21 September 2011 16:53, David Gerarddgerard@gmail.com wrote:
They do it by crowdsourcing a mass American bias, don't they?
An American POV being enforced strikes me as a problematic solution.
(I know that FAQ says "global community". What they mean is "people all around the world who are Silicon Valley technologists like us - you know, normal people." This approach also has a number of fairly obvious problems.)
I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, I think, but this effect cuts both ways.
We already know that our community skews to - as you put it - "people all around the world who are technologists like us". As a result, that same community is who decides what images are reasonable and appropriate to put in articles.
People look at images and say - yes, it's appropriate, yes, it's encyclopedic, no, it's excessively violent, no, that's gratuitous nudity, yes, I like kittens, etc etc etc. You do it, I do it, we try to be sensible, but we're not universally representative. The community, over time, imposes its own de facto standards on the content, and those standards are those of - well, we know what our systemic biases are. We've not managed a quick fix to that problem, not yet.
One of the problems with the discussions about the image filter is that many of them argue - I paraphrase - that "Wikipedia must not be censored because it would stop being neutral". But is the existing "Wikipedian POV" *really* the same as "neutral", or are we letting our aspirations to inclusive global neutrality win out over the real state of affairs? It's the great big unexamined assumption in our discussions...
You describe us as geeks and that we can't write in a way that would please the readers. Since we are geeks, we are strongly biased and write down POV all day. If that is true, why is Wikipedia such a success? Why people read it? Do they like geeky stuff?
Don't you think that we would have thousands of complaints a day if your words would be true at all? Just have a look at the article [[hentai]] and look at the illustration. How many complaints about this image do we get a day? None, because it is less then one complain in a month, while the article itself is viewed about 8.000 times a day.[1] That would make up one complainer in 240.000 (0,0004%). Now we could argue that only some of them would comment on the issue. Lets assume 1 of 100 or even 1 of 1000. Then it are still only 0,04% or 0,4%. That is the big mass of users we want to support get more contributers?