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]
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 12:26 PM, Leigh Thelmadatter <osamadre(a)hotmail.com>wrote;wrote:
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(a)gmail.com
To: wikimedia-l(a)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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Jeevan Jose <jkadavoor(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> > See the comment by Pristurus<
> >
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pristurus>
> > 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(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Jeevan Jose <jkadavoor(a)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?
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