Dear Wikimedia community,
First, I want to thank the 24,000 editors who participated in the Wikimedia Foundation's referendum on the proposed personal image hiding feature. We are particularly grateful to the nearly seven thousand people who took the time to write in detailed and thoughtful comments. Thank you.
Although the Board did not commission the referendum (it was commissioned by our Executive Director), we have read the results and followed the discussions afterwards with great interest. We discussed them at our Board meeting in San Francisco, in October. We are listening, and we are hearing you.
The referendum results show that there is significant division inside the Wikimedia community about the potential value and impact of an image hiding feature.
The majority of editors who responded to the referendum are not opposed to the feature. However, a significant minority is opposed. Some of those people say there is no problem, and that anyone who is offended is wrong and should be ignored. Some say that regardless of whether there is a problem, it's not ours to solve: our job is to make knowledge available to everyone, not to participate in screening or filtering it. And some say that even if there is a problem, a category-based image hiding feature is the wrong solution, because it would enable censorship by third parties, and would also create significant new work for editors in creating and maintaining categories. Some of you say these are editorial issues, and the Wikimedia Foundation has no business being involved with them.
I, and the other Board members, and Sue, are paying attention to what you've told us.
We believe there is a problem. The purpose of the Wikimedia movement is to make information freely available to people all around the world, and when material on the projects causes grave offence, those offended don't benefit from our work. We believe that exercising editorial judgment to mitigate that offence is not censorship. We believe we need, and should want, to treat readers with respect. Their opinions and preferences are as legitimate as our own, and deliberately offending or provoking them is not respectful, and is not okay.
We are not going to revisit the resolution from May, for the moment: we let that resolution stand unchanged.
But, we are asking Sue and the staff to continue the conversation with editors, and to find a solution that strikes the best balance between serving our readers, empowering and supporting editors, and dedicating an appropriate amount of effort to the problem. I believe that is possible within the language of the resolution the Board already passed, which leaves open most details of how implementation should be achieved.
We realize this is an important issue for the Wikimedia movement, and in many ways it goes to the heart of who we are. I think church.of.emacs expressed this fairly well on foundation-l, when he described this as a conflict between two visions of our work: “a project of pure enlightenment, which ignores the biased/prejudiced reader and accepts the resulting limited distribution” versus “a project of praxis, which seeks a balance between the goals of enlightenment and the reader's interests, aiming at a high distribution.” I would quibble with some of his choice of words, but I agree with the general gist of what he said.
I believe we can find an answer that is right for us. I ask you to work with us, to do that.
Sincerely, Ting Chen