Dear all,
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...
We are working on a Q&A document that will be published after Wikimania.
The following is the resolution's text:
"In May 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution regarding controversial content. The resolution included a request to the Executive Director to implement a "personal image hiding feature" for the Wikimedia projects.
Following a community poll organized by the Foundation, and extensive discussion in various venues, it has become clear that this issue can be be highly divisive and distracting to the Wikimedia community. We trust our community, and we respect the arguments that have been made opposing the feature as well as those in support of it. We affirm our support for better user choice and user preferences, but do not want to prescribe a specific mechanism for offering that choice. Therefore we rescind the request to develop this feature. The remainder of the May 2011 resolution remains in effect."
Cheers
Bishakha
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
The board resolution announcement presently shows that it passed 9-1, with Jimbo's the only voice dissenting:
http://www.webcitation.org/69AyEvzIS
On his talk page, however, Jimbo claims that this misrepresents him, and that he voted to scrap the image filter like everyone else:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&oldid=50...
It was an in-person meeting. How can there be any doubt about how someone voted? At any rate, a few weeks ago on Twitter, Jimbo still told Larry Sanger that he strongly supported the filter, and would write it himself and switch it on tomorrow if he could:
https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/207750504405667842 https://twitter.com/jimmy_wales/status/207838261689851904
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 1:53 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
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
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Thank you!
On Sun, Jul 15, 2012 at 1:13 AM, Bishakha Datta bishakhadatta@gmail.com wrote:
Dear all,
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...
We are working on a Q&A document that will be published after Wikimania.
The following is the resolution's text:
"In May 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees unanimously passed a resolution regarding controversial content. The resolution included a request to the Executive Director to implement a "personal image hiding feature" for the Wikimedia projects.
Following a community poll organized by the Foundation, and extensive discussion in various venues, it has become clear that this issue can be be highly divisive and distracting to the Wikimedia community. We trust our community, and we respect the arguments that have been made opposing the feature as well as those in support of it. We affirm our support for better user choice and user preferences, but do not want to prescribe a specific mechanism for offering that choice. Therefore we rescind the request to develop this feature. The remainder of the May 2011 resolution remains in effect."
Cheers
Bishakha _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
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