Bishakha Datta wrote:
At its 11 July board meeting, the Board of Trustees passed a resolution rescinding its previous direction to implement the personal image hiding feature.
The resolution is online at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:_Personal_Image_Hiding_Featur...
Well, all right. I suppose this gives you all some legitimacy (your resolution won't be flatly ignored) and allows Sue/the Wikimedia Foundation to focus on more pressing matters. Good job.
At the moment, I'm mostly of the mind that this is something that outside groups need to focus on themselves. When you look at the individual problems presented here (pornography in search results at school or work, articles with graphic imagery, etc.), there's simply no good answer. Particular problems require particular solutions. That's been one of the reasons that creating a technical tool has been so difficult. There was never any clear problem, there were a thousand mostly clear problems, each with different slightly different solutions and complexities.
If people are truly pining for a School-Safe Wikipedia, there's a small business waiting to be born, isn't there? There are already similar projects, e.g., http://schools-wikipedia.org/.
The Wikimedia Foundation should focus its resources on helping the community develop quality, free educational content. If someone wants to create Porn-Free Wikipedia or School-Safe Wikipedia or whatever else, I think we shouldn't encourage or discourage it. The line should be: the content is under a free license; do what you want with it.
That also means exercising reasonable and mature editorial judgment on the various Wikimedia wikis. This is something that Wikimedians are often terrible at. It'd be good if there were a way to address this.
We are working on a Q&A document that will be published after Wikimania.
I hope you all include "What has been learned from this?" :-) Lots of good lessons for all three sides here, I think (staff, Board, and community).
MZMcBride