I am amazed by the Keep votes the various deletion requests for images in the BDSM gallery
-- files that are not actually used by any project -- are getting.
Editors are saying, with a straight face, that there is "no implied sexual
activity" in BDSM images like
are not
pornographic.
Andreas
--- On Sat, 8/5/10, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Sydney Poore <sydney.poore(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates
To: mnemonic(a)gmail.com, "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Saturday, 8 May, 2010, 17:27
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Mike
Godwin <mnemonic(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I want to write personally -- not speaking on
behalf
of the Foundation but
instead as a longtime participant in online
communities who has worked
extensively on free-speech issues -- to offer my
perspective on a couple of
themes that I've seen made in threads here.
The first
is the claim that
Jimmy's actions represent a collapse in the
face of a
threat by Fox News
(and that this threat was somehow small or
insignificant). The second is
the
idea that the proper focus of the current discussion
ought to be focused on
Jimmy (and anger against Jimmy's taking
action, or
against particular
aspects of the actions he took) to the effective
exclusion of discussion of
whether Wikimedia Commons policy should be
revisited,
refined, or better
implemented.
First, my belief as a former journalist is that Fox
News is not a
responsible news organization. This means that
they
get too many stories
wrong in the first place (as when they
uncritically
echo Larry Sanger's
uninformed and self-interested assertions), and
it
also means that when
their mistakes are brought to their attention,
they
may redouble their
aggressive attacks in the hope of somehow
vindicating
their original story.
This I believe is what Fox News (or at least its
reporter and her editors)
were trying to do. If the media culture in the
United
States were such that
Fox News had no influence outside itself, we
could
probably just ignore it.
But the reality is that the virulent culture of
Fox
News does manage to
infect other media coverage in ways that are
destructive to good people and
to good projects.
I disagree with the suggestion that it would have been
better for Fox to
have gone with the original story they were
trying to
create rather than
with the story Jimmy in effect created for them.
Jimmy's decision to
intervene changed the narrative they were
attempting
to create. So even if
you disagree with some or all of the particulars
of
Jimmy's actions, you
may
still be able to see how Jimmy's actions, taken as a
whole, created
breathing space for discussion of an issue on
Commons
that even many of
Jimmy's critics believe is a real issue.
The question then becomes whether we're doing to
discuss the issues of
Commons policy or discuss whether Jimmy's
actions
themselves signify a
problem that needs to be fixed. You may say we
can discuss both, and
technically you'd be right, but the reality
of human
discourse is that if
you spend your time venting at Jimmy, you
won't be
discussing Commons
policy, and you'll be diverting attention
from Commons
policy. My personal
opinion is that this would be the waste of an
opportunity.
I think it's also worth remembering that when an
individual like Jimmy is
given extraordinary cross-project powers to use
in
extraordinary
circumstances, this more or less guarantees that
any
use of those powers
will be controversial. (If they were
uncontroversial,
nobody would need
them, since consensus processes would fix all
problems
quickly and
effectively.) But rather than focus on whether
your
disagreement with the
particulars of what Jimmy did means that
Jimmy's
powers should be removed,
you should choose instead, I believe, to use this
abrupt intervention as an
opportunity to discuss whether Commons policy and
its
implementation can be
improved in a way that brings it more into line
with
the Wikimedia
projects'
mission. Once this discussion happens, it would not
surprise me if the
result turned out to be that some of the material
deleted by Jimmy will be
restored by the community -- probably with
Jimmy's
approval in many cases.
To the extent that Jimmy's intervention has triggered
a healthy debate
about
policy, I think the powers he used, and the decisions
-- not individually
but taken as a whole -- that he made are
justified.
(Like many of you, I
would probably disagree with some of his
particular
decisions, but I
recognize that I'd be critical of
anyone's particular
decisions.) It is not
the case, after all, that Jimmy routinely
intervenes
in projects these days
-- it is mostly the case that he forbears from
intervening, which is as it
should be, and which I think speaks well of his
restraint. It should be
kept in mind, I think, that Jimmy's
intervention was
aimed at protecting
our
projects from external threat and coercion, precisely
to give breathing
space to the kind of dialog and consensus
processes
that we all value and
believe to be core principles of Wikimedia
projects. I
hope that rather
than
venting and raging about what was done in the face of
an imminent and
vicious threat gives way to some forward-looking
discussion of how things
can be made better. This discussion is best
focused on
policy, and not on
Jimmy, in my view, since Jimmy's actions
represent
efforts to protect the
Wikimedia projects and movement. That's where
our
efforts should be focused
too.
--Mike
I fully endorse every aspect of Mike Godwin's comment.
The Boards statement makes it clear that their view is that
Community
discussion is needed to find long term solutions to the
issue. And that "not
censored" should not be used to halt discussions about the
way to manage
content.
The clean up project initiated by Jimmy on Commons has
brought much needed
attention to a long standing problem. Now is the time for
the Community to
focus on cleaning up Commons and writing a sensible policy
about managing
sexual content.
Sydney Poore
(FloNight)
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