All, I'd like to address this issue as a frequent Commons contributor, and as somebody who actually got heavily involved with Commons a few years ago due to an issue much like this one.
There are often front-page images on Commons that are questionable, because they offend somebody's sensibilities, or -- in my view, worse -- because they are placed there more for self-promotion, than to advance our educational mission.
When this happens, there is a natural assumption -- one that I made myself a few years ago[1]:
* There is a process for choosing the Picture (or Media) of the Day, and that process is not working right.
But that assumption is incorrect! Instead, the sad truth is essentially this:
* THERE IS NO PROCESS FOR CHOOSING THE PICTURE OF THE DAY.[2]
Anybody can select an upcoming picture of the day; and although these selections are visible ahead of time, there is no active editorial community poring over them and making decisions. So all it takes is ONE person's error in judgment, or unabashed self-promotion, for GARBAGE to appear on the front page of Wikimedia Commons *and* all the projects that automatically pull Commons' POTD for their own POTD.
Coming from the perspective of English Wikipedia, which has a huge community of people making editorial decisions about all kinds of things, this is not an easy concept to get used to. And if we really want to talk about a general solution (I do!), it will require addressing a very different state of affairs than we usually find on English Wikipedia.
Pharos suggests we should have "more process" and Andrew Lih points out that, prior to this email list discussion, there was no on-wiki discussion to fork. These are important points to consider! How can you create effective processes and discussions, when there is no coherent group standing ready to implement them?
It's easy to shake our fists at the state of things. Actually creating something that will avoid future problems, though, will take a lot of work from a lot of people. How can we make that happen?
-Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Peteforsyth/PotD [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Picture_of_the_day/Instructions
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 12:26 PM, Leigh Thelmadatter osamadre@hotmail.comwrote:
FWIW, the still caught my eye (uncommon for the media section of the page) and I read the caption, which does give context.
The main product of Buchenwald and other camps was death. Why do we want to cover that up? I saw nothing wrong with it, just as there was nothing wrong with all the photographs of the dead I saw in school hallways as part of Holocaust remembrances.
Offensive is gore for the sake of gore. Obviously, this is not the case here.
Date: Fri, 9 May 2014 12:11:49 -0700 From: kgorman@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't
prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
Pine: besides the unusually high effect Commons has on other projects
(most
projects are essentially forced to use Commons,) Commons' lack of a local canvassing policy, and the general unenforceability of canvassing
policies
on mailing lists anyway, when a local project has a low population of active editors and is pretty consistently making poor decisions that
impact
all projects, I see absolutely nothing wrong with raising the discussion
at
a higher-than-local level, and don't think that raising a discussion at a higher-than-local level needs to be done in a neutral fashion. I think that Commons' not uncommonly acts in a way that is actively detrimental
to
every other project (and a way that is certainly actively detrimental to building relationships with edu and GLAM institutions,) and given that there's not a large local population on Commons, think a non-neutral posting to a broader audience is absolutely appropriate. Discussion of issues with the Acehnese Wikipedia years ago wasn't confined to the Acehnese Wikipedia, and in recent years issues with the Kazakh Wikipedia and at least a couple of other projects have been brought up on a meta level as well. (The fact that the decision to put a piece of content like this on Common's frontpage was made by *two people* highlights an issue
as
well..)
I'm not upset about the fact that we have a video of the aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald on Commons - if we didn't, I'd go find one and upload it. It's an event (and a video) of enormous historic
significance,
and not one that should ever be forgotten. I'm not even opposed to featuring it on Commons' frontpage - in a way that adheres to the
principle
of least astonishment and provides viewers with context. That's not what was done here. A still image featuring a pile of corpses was put on Commons' frontpage with any context whatsoever only provided for viewers
of
five languages - and we run projects in 287 different languages. More
than
that, since Commons only supports open video formats, a sizable majority
of
people who use Wikimedia projects are literally incapable of actually playing the video in question. Is there enough journalistic or
educational
value in displaying a still photo of a pile of corpses that links to a video that cannot be played by most people that provides after the fact context in only 5 of the 287 languages we run projects in to justify putting it on Commons front page? I'm gonna go with no.
FWIW: I would explicitly support featuring this video (or an article
about
Buchenwald, etc,) albeit with a different freezeframe and appropriate context provided, on the frontpage of the English Wikipedia or any other project where it was actually possible to provide appropriate context to the viewership of the project. ENWP's article about Buchenwald - quite rightly - contains numerous images more graphic than the one that was on Commons front page yesterday. They add significant educational value to the article - and they also only appear past the lede of the article, at
a
point when anyone reading the article will be fully aware what the
article
is about and will have intentionally sought the article out - rather
than,
say, going to Commons to look up an image of a horse and being confronted with a freezeframe of a stack of bodies from a video your browser cannot play with context provided only in languages you do not speak.
Kevin Gorman Wikipedian-in-Residence American Cultures Program UC Berkeley
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com
wrote:
See the comment by Pristurus< https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pristurus%3E at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Dead_bodies.3F
Regards, Jee
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:57 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com
wrote:
Already answered on the talk page by the editor who had chosen
it.
Comment
there if you really want to help us. Continue the comments here
if
other
interests. ;)
Regards, Jee
Ah, thanks. Amazing how handy links are. I was a little surprised to
see
that even on that talkpage, you asked people to move the discussion to
yet
a different page. I asked that question because a debate on the merits might be somewhat moot if the still was selected randomly or by
software,
it's interesting to see that it wasn't.
In any case, Pristurus has a good point and one that it would be hard
to
craft a policy around. Least astonishment is a useful principle, but it doesn't beat out journalistic and/or educational value. Newspapers, magazines, textbooks and other sources of educational material often
pick
striking images of tragic or shocking circumstances. The point is
precisely
to draw attention, to disrupt the consciousness of the viewer so that
the
meaning behind the image and any accompanying material sinks in and the message is imparted strongly. Good sources of knowledge do this rarely
but
well; shock sites do it constantly and for no particular reason.
Many Pulitzer prize winning photographs feature dead people, people who have been shot, dismembered, even people in the midst of burning alive. They win prizes because they have extraordinary communicative power and meaningfully illustrate very important subjects. Would anyone truly
argue
that such images should never be used on the main page of any project? _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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