*The roots of the problem*
Michael, if the Board is analyzing the issue then it should address the roots of the problem.
The fact that recent discussion has taken place around sexual images has the advantage that sex raises a lot of interest from everybody.
But from my point of view the issue is grounded in two deeper problems: 1) what happens if the board takes a decision against the community consensus? 2) What happens if the community of a project rejects discussing deeply an issue up to finding a consensus, if they simply vote and applies the majority decision?
It seems to me that this is what happened. The community defined a policy without analyzing the issue deeply enough, they didn’t reached a consensus. The board decided that this should addressed and Jimbo actuated.
Perhaps this is a caricature of what happened. Surely the real story is far more complex. There was an open debate in the community, the board resolution was more or less ambiguous, and the actions of Jimbo could have been more polite. But I believe that the roots of the problem are more or less there.
*Proposed changes in the system*
From my point of view the system should be changed in two ways:
First Wikimedia Foundation (and its governing body, the Board) should have a mechanism to force the community to debate and search for a consensus. Call it founder’s flag or voice of conscience flag or whatever you want. This is exactly what Jimbo did. He didn’t impose his will although founder’s flag gave him the power to do it.
Secondly it should be stated clearly that once a true consensus is reached, the community is sovereign in developing the project. The duty of the Foundation is providing the means to put in practice those decisions. To put a humoristic example, if the law of some state says that the value for number pi is mandatorily 3.2 [1] and the community reaches the consensus that we must explain clearly that the law is wrong, then if necessary the Foundarion must avoid being under the rules of that state.
Perhaps some other hygienic measures should be taken. By example perhaps stewards should hold only rights to change user’s status but not to act as sysop of any project.
*The case of Images and other “sensible” material*
Going to the images with sexual content I think that this should be addresses in a parallel way as other sensible issues like:
1) Images that could offend people of some religion.
2) Images in fair use.
3) Statements in biographies of living people.
4) Statements that can harm the image of products or companies.
5) Naming the articles when the name can carry a biased point of view. By example naming the articles of small towns in Spain using the name imposed by fascist dictatorship instead of the official Spanish name.
6) Contents possibly infringing copyrights.
7) Etc.
I think that in those cases we should not change our policies to make happy the affected people but we should create mechanisms to guarantee we are in the safe side: Not publish or publish only the safe official version until we have enough evidences that the sensible material is right, legal, relevant, and has educational purposes. Perhaps we must strength some policies; perhaps to call somebody “thief” in their biography we can’t accept any kind of reference but a reference providing clear evidences that this is true. We also must give to the world clear evidences that we are extremely serious and careful with this issues if we decide to put an image “sensible” there must be clear evidences that we have done our best to guarantee that this image has educational content, that this image is required for the project, that this image accomplish with the law. We can’t make happy everybody; our goal of providing the sum of all human knowledge is above the interest of reaching a broader public or making happy some kind of readers. But we can make everybody agree with us that in “sensible issues” we have strong reasons to say every thing we say and to provide every image we have.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill
Message: 9 Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 23:42:44 -0700 From: Michael Snow wikipedia@verizon.net Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4BEE4264.9020408@verizon.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
On 5/7/2010 5:30 PM, Sue Gardner wrote:
On 7 May 2010 16:07, Kim Bruningkim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote:
announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement:
Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject?
sincerly, Kim Bruning
Kim, the board (and I) have been talking about this for the past couple of days, and we'll continue to talk about it over the next couple of weeks. I think it's fairly likely there will be some kind of statement or statements at the end of that. I'm expecting that over the next few weeks, we all will be paying attention to the conversations on Commons and elsewhere, including here.
Just to come back to this point, the board has had some ongoing discussion and will be having a meeting on Tuesday, May 18. I don't know for certain that there will be a statement following that meeting, or whether there will be any particular outcome. I have been informed that some resolutions will be proposed, but I can't predict whether they will be acted upon.
Also, did anyone keep a log of the open meeting from Wednesday in the #wikimedia IRC channel? Has that been posted anywhere for others to review?
--Michael Snow
On 5/15/2010 4:34 AM, Joan Goma wrote:
*The roots of the problem*
Michael, if the Board is analyzing the issue then it should address the roots of the problem.
We would like to. Roots are sometimes difficult to get at.
The fact that recent discussion has taken place around sexual images has the advantage that sex raises a lot of interest from everybody.
But from my point of view the issue is grounded in two deeper problems: 1) what happens if the board takes a decision against the community consensus? 2) What happens if the community of a project rejects discussing deeply an issue up to finding a consensus, if they simply vote and applies the majority decision?
It seems to me that this is what happened. The community defined a policy without analyzing the issue deeply enough, they didn’t reached a consensus. The board decided that this should addressed and Jimbo actuated.
Perhaps this is a caricature of what happened. Surely the real story is far more complex. There was an open debate in the community, the board resolution was more or less ambiguous, and the actions of Jimbo could have been more polite. But I believe that the roots of the problem are more or less there.
As you say, it's an oversimplification and it doesn't match the details exactly, but you've done well nevertheless at focusing on essential concepts. I would think that the board is unlikely to make a decision that goes against full community consensus. Reaching or identifying that consensus can be a challenge, though, as I think anyone who's worked on highly debated topics on the wiki knows. Sometimes there's a lack of analysis (or simply attention) that makes an apparent consensus immature, not the consensus that would be reached if everyone was really involved.
In many cases, this isn't that big of a problem. Not inventing policies until there's a need for them is usually wise, as it gives people the freedom to be bold and move the work of the projects forward, without worrying about mastering complex rules. But on occasion, this has meant that inadequate care was given to issues of serious concern, as used to be the case with biographies of living people.
I don't know that the community has ever really rejected the idea of serious discussion in such a situation. People sometimes argue based on various "votes" (more like opinion polls, really), but I think most of us understand those are not definitive. The problem is more that it's quite challenging to conduct these discussions, and as a tool, a wiki is better suited to other tasks we do than to this one.
*Proposed changes in the system*
From my point of view the system should be changed in two ways:
First Wikimedia Foundation (and its governing body, the Board) should have a mechanism to force the community to debate and search for a consensus. Call it founder’s flag or voice of conscience flag or whatever you want. This is exactly what Jimbo did. He didn’t impose his will although founder’s flag gave him the power to do it.
I think this is a good concept and part of what we are trying to figure out is the right tools for it. I suspect the "founder" flag was not the right tool for a number of reasons. Now that it has been removed from the equation, how would people suggest that this be set up?
Secondly it should be stated clearly that once a true consensus is reached, the community is sovereign in developing the project. The duty of the Foundation is providing the means to put in practice those decisions. To put a humoristic example, if the law of some state says that the value for number pi is mandatorily 3.2 [1] and the community reaches the consensus that we must explain clearly that the law is wrong, then if necessary the Foundarion must avoid being under the rules of that state.
To give a more serious example, we have a consensus on Creative Commons licensing, and in fact there was a desire from the community to go in this direction long before we were ultimately able to. I don't imagine that changing unless a better free licensing system arises and the consensus changes. So to answer your suggestion, I'd reiterate my earlier point: I really don't envision the board or the foundation going against anything that amounts to a true consensus in the community.
--Michael Snow
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org