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On 09/05/2010 10:24, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote:
This message is CC'ed to other people who might
wish to comment on this potential approach
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Dear reader at FOSI,
As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on
which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions.
Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has
led to enormous problems, because for the first time, a largely uncensored system has to
work in the boundaries of a world that is largely censored. For libraries and schools this
means that they want to provide Wikipedia and its related projects to their readers, but
are presented with the problem of what some people might consider, information that is not
"child-safe". They have several options in that case, either blocking completely
or using context aware filtering software that may make mistakes, that can cost some of
these institutions their funding.
Similar problems are starting to present themselves in countries around the world,
differing views about sexuality between northern and southern europe for instance. Add to
that the censoring of images of Muhammad, Tiananman square, the Nazi Swastika, and a host
of other problems. Recently there has been concern that all this all-out-censoring of
content by parties around the world is damaging the education mission of the Wikipedia
related projects because so many people are not able to access large portions of our
content due to a small (think 0.01% ) part of our other content.
This has led some people to infer that perhaps it is time to rate the content of
Wikipedia ourselves, in order to facilitate external censoring of material, hopefully
making the rest of our content more accessible. According to statements around the web
ICRA ratings are probably the most widely supported rating by filtering systems. Thus we
were thinking of adding autogenerated ICRA RDF tags to each individual page describing the
rating of the page and the images contained within them. I have a few questions however,
both general and technical.
1: If I am correctly informed, Wikipedia would be the first website of this size to label
their content with ratings, is this correct?
2: How many content filters understand the RDF tags
3: How many of those understand multiple labels and path specific labeling. This means:
if we rate the path of images included on the page different from the page itself, do
filters block the entire content, or just the images ? (Consider the Virgin Killer album
cover on the Virgin Killer article, if you are aware of that controversial image
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer)
4: Do filters understand per page labeling ? Or do they cache the first RDF file they
encounter on a website and use that for all other pages of the website ?
5: Is there any chance the vocabulary of ICRA can be expanded with new ratings for
non-Western world sensitive issues ?
6: Is there a possibility of creating a separate "namespace" that we could
potentially use for our own labels ?
I hope that you can help me answer these questions, so that we may continue our community
debate with more informed viewpoints about the possibilities of content rating. If you
have additional suggestions for systems or problems that this web-property should account
for, I would more than welcome those suggestions as well.
Derk-Jan Hartman
You may want to use
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Censorship to discuss
this. It seems that you're community has reached some ideas questions.
Foundation-1 also is discussing several approaches to censorship.
I think we would all benefit from sharing on a common page. I propose to
the foundation mailing list to scavenge the last 300 mails of discussion
to put on this page:
1- a summary of the events of the last days, with the board declarations
and citations, in order to explain why, how and by who the deletions
happened, if they will happen again and how much support there is.
Some mails that I find relevant for starters:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057789.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2010-May/000008.ht…
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057802.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057818.html
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/27/wikipedia-child-porn-larry-sanger…
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Petition_to_Jimbo
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/QA_Wikimedia_Commons_images_review,_May…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058026.html
2 - a summary of the positions about censorship
for example:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057850.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057856.html
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/057859.html
3 - a summary of the technical solutions about censorship
example:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-May/058053.html
Forgive my disordered, subjective and partial selection: I don't have
time to do it myself. But I think each one should summarize his own
reflections and help build the page
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Censorship. Things will become clearer
for everyone if we build upon our discussions.
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