Message: 6
Date: Fri, 2 Dec 2011 14:55:29 +0200 From: Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CAJ9-EKLOfhu5jycOt6i4fMm-CRM=0wrtT=e4=Orhmg--_RTROQ@mail.gmail.com
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On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 1:00 PM, WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com wrote:
I'm pretty sure that the community is against a filter system based on
our
commons categories.
.
Thankfully the Foundation seems to have taken that message on board and though we can expect to continue to have pro-filter people joining the debate and trying to revive that type of proposal, I'm pretty sure it is dead in the water.
Not according to their meeting minutes. It does seem there are people still flailing around with a horse-whip, thinking that if they just whip the dead horse hard enough, it will rise up and be a useful steed.
The bit I was referring to was:
"that the Board send a letter to the community acknowledging opposition to the filter idea; that the idea of a category-based system be dropped, as it is problematic and highly controversial, but that staff continue discussions with the community about how to build a system that would meet the Board's objectives; and that the staff also continue to focus on their work to recruit a more diverse editor body, including women and people from the global south. Sue noted that we do not currently have technical work scheduled on the filter, so there is time to develop ideas that acknowledge community objections. This course of action was agreed to. " http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2011-10-07
My reading of that is that the board has agreed to drop the idea of a filter based on our category system, but unfortunately they haven't yet agreed to drop the idea that someone controlling an IP could censor what other viewers using that IP can see.
I'm not sure that we have a consensus for or against the principle of censorship, or whether the community as a whole regards a private
personal
filter as censorship.
This is one of those canards that just keep popping up, despite having been comprehensively debunked time and again. We have always had a consensus against censorship, and Jimbo even used to enforce it through bans and blocks.
We already have a no censorship policy that makes various exceptions. For Example Paedophilia advocates get blocked on site on EN wikipedia. There may in the past have been a consensus against any change to that policy, but there hasn't been a recent site wide reconsideration of that consensus. DE Wikipedia had an overwhelming vote, but they may not reflect views on the rest of the site, and not being a German speaker I'm not sure to what extent their vote was a decisive rejection of the proposal that was then on the table or a rejection of filtering in principle.
On the one hand at least one Wikimedian is asserting that the community is opposed to censorship in principle, and that even a private personal filter would be censorship. On the other hand the board still wants the image filter to be usable for IPs and not just logged in users
despite the fact that we have no way to implement an IP level system without allowing some people to censor other people's Wikimedia viewing.
If you mean me, I am not asserting, I am reminding that this issue has been visited and revisited more times than anybody can be bothered to count. And the consensus has always been the same. The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
Change on wiki is sometimes slow as consensus makes for a very conservative(cautious) policy making process. But that doesn't entitle the opponents of change to oppose simply because an idea is similar to ones that have been rejected before. If the proponents of change are making an effort to meet the objections raised to similar proposals, then to operate in a spirit of consensus the defenders of the status quo should at the very least explain how the latest proposal doesn't meet or all or some of their objections. Otherwise the supporters of change may reasonably assume that they've won the argument and only have inertia to overcome. That said there is an argument for having a minimum interval between reviews of a policy - and if this current debate were to conclude with the consensus against those of us who are trying to formulate a filter proposal that would be acceptable to the community then I would hope we could agree not to reopen the debate for at least a year - or two if the majority is significant.
WSC
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]