I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my experiences with commons.
Like many people I've had the experience of bumping into a human sexuality related commons category or gallery and thinking "Holy crap! Thats a lot of [gallery name]. Freeking teenage pornofreaks!".
But unlike many other people, I am in a position to do something about it: I'm a commons administrator and checkuser reasonably well respected in the commons community (when I'm not inactive, at least), well connected to the commons star-chamber, and I've played a role in many of the internal 'governance by fiat' events. I think it's likely that a majority of my deletions have been technically "out of process", but by keeping a good working relationship with the rest of the commons community this hasn't been a problem at all.
To take action you have to understand a few things: "The problem", "The lay of the land", and "The goal".
Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem? (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute (it's just a big porn site!) (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even risk bumping into the law (underage models)
I'm sure others can be listed but these are sufficient for now.
"The lay of the land"
Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very broadly. In particular the commons community expects the public to also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers the educational mission.
There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons:
Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective communication with these customers. Some Wikimedia projects rely on commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community. This relationship works because of trust which the commons community has built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues when hasty acts do cause issues.
Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on matters of taste. Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more reliable as an image source for customer projects.
I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the policy somehow.
There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time, but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists everywhere in our projects.
There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art, basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored.
... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the languages the discussions are held in.
"The goal"
Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems?
Lets take a category of Penis images as an example. Load it up. Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this, right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive mission of commons in educating through media).
Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP article in some language. An example of every disease with penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already. People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will differ.
So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to hundreds of pictures of penises. Now— commons' hundreds are not so diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational remit we still need a bunch.
Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements? Well, With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast commons as a penis palace. Thus, in terms of this class of images— problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god; it's full of cocks" response, they can...
Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ categorical blocking software. They block broad categories like "Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories. Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering services are often criticized for blocking information on breast exams, for example. Because of the way the blocking happens reducing the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way. So problem (2) seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission.
I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces (which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately).
Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without privacy problems. But accepting these images heightens the perception that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting educational resources.
The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected. As a checkuser (with OTRS access) I can't say that I've seen evidence of abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them.
Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily deleted without dispute. I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other people may get different results.
Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things?
We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers. I'm at a loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really hard.
Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention: Commons has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated completely without regard to the community process was described as an "almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about 0.008% of the collection.
At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work on.
None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance. Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one satisfactorily.
The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion. I expect the same is true for many other contributors.
... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish ex-nupedian, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are suddenly in need of a major effort. I can promise you that a far greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden malware, etc.
Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some excusability for disruption to our customer projects.
But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal governance. We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of the deletions. There is no active discussion about making an improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship. Many other messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail.
I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will foster improved communication on the subject.
Thank you Greg, for this brilliant and personal overview. Very helpful.
A few thoughts:
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem? (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute (it's just a big porn site!)
This can be addressed in part by increasing the quality standard for our images. A well-ordered set of anatomy images, in standard proscribed frame and format, from an established cross-section of races or backgrounds : this would be excellent. It would also be a useful model to follow for all sorts of anatomical images (you could use the same models to get entire sets of images of the body).
Likewise, a well-ordered set of images of jewelry and piercings, perhaps organized in partnership with a large piercing/jewelry parlor in a multiethnic community, would also be easy enough to set up -- and would quickly replace the many lazily-shot and casually curated images we have today. (note that I didn't specify genital jewelry and piercings; though that would be part of the series).
A gorgeous and professionally made encyclopedia of sexuality might not be to some people's tastes, but wouldn't inspire them to say 'just a big porn site!', just as the Museum of Sex has acquired a very respectable following and media coverage in New York. That is something we should aspire to.
(And if some people want to debate whether we want to host such a specialized sub-encyclopedia on Foundation servers, or on servers belonging to the Dutch chapter, for fear of overly strict laws in the US - that's fine. The point is, this is a topic worth covering beautifully and comprehensively, like all important topics, and we should not shortchange it.)
(2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries
I think there are good solutions here, beginning with communicating directly with schools and libraries and find solutions that work for them. For instance, making sure that they have access to schools-wikipedia.org and similar snapshot sites until they can find a way to provide access to all of wikipedia.
Working on these solutions may be a good way to recruit new teacher editors, as well.
(3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even risk bumping into the law (underage models)
This is the easiest one to address. Requiring proof of model release, the way we require proof of copyright release, would be an excellent start -- and doing this on general principle, not just in cases where a face is recognizable: make sure you have the model's permission. This is simply a philosophical question; we can afford to be picky and only host images that we are sure the model was comfortable with publishing.
SJ
"The lay of the land"
Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very broadly. In particular the commons community expects the public to also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers the educational mission.
There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons:
Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective communication with these customers. Some Wikimedia projects rely on commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community. This relationship works because of trust which the commons community has built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues when hasty acts do cause issues.
Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on matters of taste. Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more reliable as an image source for customer projects.
I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the policy somehow.
There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time, but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists everywhere in our projects.
There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art, basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored.
... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the languages the discussions are held in.
"The goal"
Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems?
Lets take a category of Penis images as an example. Load it up. Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this, right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive mission of commons in educating through media).
Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP article in some language. An example of every disease with penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already. People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will differ.
So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to hundreds of pictures of penises. Now— commons' hundreds are not so diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational remit we still need a bunch.
Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements? Well, With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast commons as a penis palace. Thus, in terms of this class of images— problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god; it's full of cocks" response, they can...
Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ categorical blocking software. They block broad categories like "Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories. Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering services are often criticized for blocking information on breast exams, for example. Because of the way the blocking happens reducing the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way. So problem (2) seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission.
I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces (which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately).
Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without privacy problems. But accepting these images heightens the perception that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting educational resources.
The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected. As a checkuser (with OTRS access) I can't say that I've seen evidence of abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them.
Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily deleted without dispute. I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other people may get different results.
Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things?
We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers. I'm at a loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really hard.
Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention: Commons has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated completely without regard to the community process was described as an "almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about 0.008% of the collection.
At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work on.
None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance. Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one satisfactorily.
The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion. I expect the same is true for many other contributors.
... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish ex-nupedian, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are suddenly in need of a major effort. I can promise you that a far greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden malware, etc.
Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some excusability for disruption to our customer projects.
But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal governance. We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of the deletions. There is no active discussion about making an improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship. Many other messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail.
I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will foster improved communication on the subject.
foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I refuse to believe you could read that novel and respond intelligently in 41 minutes.I'm still waiting for the cliff notes version.
^_^
-Jon
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 01:58, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Thank you Greg, for this brilliant and personal overview. Very helpful.
A few thoughts:
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem? (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute (it's just a big porn site!)
This can be addressed in part by increasing the quality standard for our images. A well-ordered set of anatomy images, in standard proscribed frame and format, from an established cross-section of races or backgrounds : this would be excellent. It would also be a useful model to follow for all sorts of anatomical images (you could use the same models to get entire sets of images of the body).
Likewise, a well-ordered set of images of jewelry and piercings, perhaps organized in partnership with a large piercing/jewelry parlor in a multiethnic community, would also be easy enough to set up -- and would quickly replace the many lazily-shot and casually curated images we have today. (note that I didn't specify genital jewelry and piercings; though that would be part of the series).
A gorgeous and professionally made encyclopedia of sexuality might not be to some people's tastes, but wouldn't inspire them to say 'just a big porn site!', just as the Museum of Sex has acquired a very respectable following and media coverage in New York. That is something we should aspire to.
(And if some people want to debate whether we want to host such a specialized sub-encyclopedia on Foundation servers, or on servers belonging to the Dutch chapter, for fear of overly strict laws in the US - that's fine. The point is, this is a topic worth covering beautifully and comprehensively, like all important topics, and we should not shortchange it.)
(2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and
libraries
I think there are good solutions here, beginning with communicating directly with schools and libraries and find solutions that work for them. For instance, making sure that they have access to schools-wikipedia.org and similar snapshot sites until they can find a way to provide access to all of wikipedia.
Working on these solutions may be a good way to recruit new teacher editors, as well.
(3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even risk bumping into the law (underage models)
This is the easiest one to address. Requiring proof of model release, the way we require proof of copyright release, would be an excellent start -- and doing this on general principle, not just in cases where a face is recognizable: make sure you have the model's permission. This is simply a philosophical question; we can afford to be picky and only host images that we are sure the model was comfortable with publishing.
SJ
"The lay of the land"
Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very broadly. In particular the commons community expects the public to also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers the educational mission.
There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on
commons:
Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective communication with these customers. Some Wikimedia projects rely on commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community. This relationship works because of trust which the commons community has built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues when hasty acts do cause issues.
Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on matters of taste. Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more reliable as an image source for customer projects.
I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the policy somehow.
There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time, but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists everywhere in our projects.
There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art, basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored.
... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the languages the discussions are held in.
"The goal"
Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems?
Lets take a category of Penis images as an example. Load it up. Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this, right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive mission of commons in educating through media).
Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP article in some language. An example of every disease with penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already. People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will differ.
So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to hundreds of pictures of penises. Now— commons' hundreds are not so diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational remit we still need a bunch.
Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements? Well, With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast commons as a penis palace. Thus, in terms of this class of images— problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god; it's full of cocks" response, they can...
Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ categorical blocking software. They block broad categories like "Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories. Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering services are often criticized for blocking information on breast exams, for example. Because of the way the blocking happens reducing the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way. So problem (2) seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission.
I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces (which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately).
Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without privacy problems. But accepting these images heightens the perception that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting educational resources.
The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected. As a checkuser (with OTRS access) I can't say that I've seen evidence of abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them.
Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily deleted without dispute. I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other people may get different results.
Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things?
We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers. I'm at a loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really hard.
Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention: Commons has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated completely without regard to the community process was described as an "almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about 0.008% of the collection.
At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work on.
None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance. Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one satisfactorily.
The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion. I expect the same is true for many other contributors.
... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish ex-nupedian, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are suddenly in need of a major effort. I can promise you that a far greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden malware, etc.
Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some excusability for disruption to our customer projects.
But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal governance. We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of the deletions. There is no active discussion about making an improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship. Many other messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail.
I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will foster improved communication on the subject.
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On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 04:17:29AM -0400, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my experiences with commons.
== It has begun.==
En.wp has moved -and the motion seems likely to carry- that all images deleted by Jimmy Wales on commons be reuploaded to en.wikipedia. This weakens Commons politically.
In addition, they have forwarded a request to commons to hold ALL editing for the time being. (This request seems unlikely to carry, unless we get a stampede that the inter-wiki diplomacy can't keep up with)
Where en.wp leads, others are sure to follow.
== Potential Consequences ==
What was not understood by the people involved in the commons-action is that they have inadvertantly hit thousands of pages, on perhaps as many as ~100 wikis, in as many countries. This is not a storm in a teacup.
Let's be explicit about potential consequences -if no action were to be taken-: * Commons might be shut down or much reduced, due to demands and actions from it's customer-wikisa. * The foundation might fragment, as local chapters take it upon themselves to host content safely away from foundation control.
== Why it probably won't be SO bad ==
That sounds pretty alarming, when put in plain text like that. However, there are several mitigating factors :-) :
* Obviously, commons is currenly doing a lot of diplomacy and damage control. [*] * The affected wikipedias themselves are also doing damage control and diplomacy. * Some chapters themselves are starting to wise up to the situation. (I'm not up-to-date on exactly what is happening there. Can someone provide more info?) * <Some> of the board members, and several of the "old school" wikimedians have jumped into the fray and are cooling things down.
== The role of the board ==
The board is clearly not competent to intervene directly in the management of local wikis. (least of all wikimedia commons). We shouldn't expect them to be. Their task is to deal with foundation matters, that is their remit. Direct intervention in Wiki-communities must be considered outside their remit.
To prevent some of the unpleasant edge cases from occurring, I think that -in the best case scenario- what we need is something along the lines of an immediate blanket apology from the board, to the effect of "sorry, we're only human, we panicked, we didn't mean to cause harm, it won't happen again".
But let's be constructive too: In the same message, the board might want to explain the fox news situation, and encourage people to work on it carefully and properly.
I would like to point out that the board's position and power is somewhat precarious at this point in time. They need to move quickly but *carefully*, should they wish to retain it. The cannot afford to get back on this in a few weeks. I forsee a few emergency midnight sessions... ;-)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
[*] This is where I've been helping a little too, via IRC.
Hi, Kim.
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
En.wp has moved -and the motion seems likely to carry- that all images deleted by Jimmy Wales on commons be reuploaded to en.wikipedia.
That discussion was started over a day ago; now that images which were in use elsewhere are being restored, it's a bit passe. Reuploading images would be a pain... as the Commons editors weighing in on that page indicated, I don't think they have any interest in deleting any useful images.
In addition, they have forwarded a request to commons to hold ALL editing for the time being.
You mean TheDJ's request from Friday night? He's a Commons admin (assuming he returns), he's not "forwarding" a request from en!
Where en.wp leads, others are sure to follow.
Thank goodness this is often not true ;)
<VISIONS OF DRAMA>
Actually, things seem to be settling down, and admins are returning to Commons. (though I'm sure you can find more drama if you look for it.)
SJ
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 08:42:16AM -0400, Samuel Klein wrote:
Hi, Kim.
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
<VISIONS OF DRAMA>
Actually, things seem to be settling down, and admins are returning to Commons. (though I'm sure you can find more drama if you look for it.)
Yes, hence I included the visions of *undrama* that followed the visions of drama. Everyone is working on cooling this down, and I hope you count me among those people.
What I wanted to show clearly was the level of risk that we've been exposed to. Hence my trotting out the worst case scenarios, instead of the best case, for this one post.
Several people at the foundation appear to not be entirely aware of what they've been causing. I wanted to make at least one post that emphasizes the risks. The intent is for some of the people at the foundation proper (you know who you are) to realise that *yes* they've been wrongly informed, and *yes* they've made a big mistake, and they need to learn from it, and show what they have learned.
Is that fair enough? :-) Was there a better way I could have put it?
sincerely, Kim Bruning
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 8:37 AM, Kim Bruning kim@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
I would like to point out that the board's position and power is somewhat precarious at this point in time. They need to move quickly but *carefully*, should they wish to retain it. The cannot afford to get back on this in a few weeks. I forsee a few emergency midnight sessions... ;-)
Here here.
300+ users have ordered the removal of Jimbo's founder powers. Not some of those powers, not half of those powers, ALL of those powers. He doesn't get to negotiate his own remedies-- the community wants doesn't want him to play the founder role.
He has disrupted the project and damaged our reputation far more than any measely porn story ever could have, and he broke all our rules in the process, and the community has ruled.
The *only* sane response for the board to this is for them to say: "Pursuant to consensus, Jimbo Wales powers are revoked"
But if they're not going to say that, they might as well say "Jimbo Wales is more important than the entirety of the commmunity, and if you have a problem with that, go away". Call the board together, have a nice vote, and give Jimbo his project back, dissolve the foundation, and let the rest of us be on our way.
Any statements in between are only going to add to the crisis. It's community vs jimbo day. WE hoped this day would never come, but it's here. Who trumps who? The board needs to decide in no uncertain terms and enforce its decision.
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:14 AM, Alec Conroy alecmconroy@gmail.com wrote:
Here here.
300+ users have ordered the removal of Jimbo's founder powers. Not some of those powers, not half of those powers, ALL of those powers. He doesn't get to negotiate his own remedies-- the community wants doesn't want him to play the founder role.
He has disrupted the project and damaged our reputation far more than any measely porn story ever could have, and he broke all our rules in the process, and the community has ruled.
The *only* sane response for the board to this is for them to say: "Pursuant to consensus, Jimbo Wales powers are revoked"
But if they're not going to say that, they might as well say "Jimbo Wales is more important than the entirety of the commmunity, and if you have a problem with that, go away". Call the board together, have a nice vote, and give Jimbo his project back, dissolve the foundation, and let the rest of us be on our way.
Any statements in between are only going to add to the crisis. It's community vs jimbo day. WE hoped this day would never come, but it's here. Who trumps who? The board needs to decide in no uncertain terms and enforce its decision.
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I've argued in the past that founder flag is anachronic and has to go. But this black-white, us-or-them rethoric is nonsense. This is not a war jimbo vs community (as much as you'd like to present this) and it's a sophomoric way to carry a thoughtful debate where main point is that community has enough maturity to take high level decisions.
This is not Jimbo the tyrant vs poor community. Please.
On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 10:14:26AM -0400, Alec Conroy wrote:
Any statements in between are only going to add to the crisis. It's community vs jimbo day. WE hoped this day would never come, but it's here. Who trumps who? The board needs to decide in no uncertain terms and enforce its decision.
Neither. We're all cooperating with each other. What needs doing is for everyone to reassure everyone else that some mistakes were made, that we're sorry, and that we all would like to keep cooperating with each other.
Would you mind putting that pitchfork down now, sir? :-)
sincerely, Kim Bruning
Thanks, Greg. This is very useful perspective and great background for those of us without Commons experience.
-stu
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 1:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my experiences with commons.
Like many people I've had the experience of bumping into a human sexuality related commons category or gallery and thinking "Holy crap! Thats a lot of [gallery name]. Freeking teenage pornofreaks!".
But unlike many other people, I am in a position to do something about it: I'm a commons administrator and checkuser reasonably well respected in the commons community (when I'm not inactive, at least), well connected to the commons star-chamber, and I've played a role in many of the internal 'governance by fiat' events. I think it's likely that a majority of my deletions have been technically "out of process", but by keeping a good working relationship with the rest of the commons community this hasn't been a problem at all.
To take action you have to understand a few things: "The problem", "The lay of the land", and "The goal".
Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem? (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute (it's just a big porn site!) (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even risk bumping into the law (underage models)
I'm sure others can be listed but these are sufficient for now.
"The lay of the land"
Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very broadly. In particular the commons community expects the public to also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers the educational mission.
There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons:
Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective communication with these customers. Some Wikimedia projects rely on commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community. This relationship works because of trust which the commons community has built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues when hasty acts do cause issues.
Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on matters of taste. Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more reliable as an image source for customer projects.
I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the policy somehow.
There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time, but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists everywhere in our projects.
There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art, basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored.
... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the languages the discussions are held in.
"The goal"
Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems?
Lets take a category of Penis images as an example. Load it up. Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this, right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive mission of commons in educating through media).
Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP article in some language. An example of every disease with penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already. People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will differ.
So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to hundreds of pictures of penises. Now— commons' hundreds are not so diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational remit we still need a bunch.
Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements? Well, With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast commons as a penis palace. Thus, in terms of this class of images— problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god; it's full of cocks" response, they can...
Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ categorical blocking software. They block broad categories like "Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories. Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering services are often criticized for blocking information on breast exams, for example. Because of the way the blocking happens reducing the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way. So problem (2) seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission.
I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces (which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately).
Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without privacy problems. But accepting these images heightens the perception that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting educational resources.
The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected. As a checkuser (with OTRS access) I can't say that I've seen evidence of abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them.
Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily deleted without dispute. I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other people may get different results.
Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things?
We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers. I'm at a loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really hard.
Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention: Commons has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated completely without regard to the community process was described as an "almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about 0.008% of the collection.
At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work on.
None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance. Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one satisfactorily.
The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion. I expect the same is true for many other contributors.
... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish ex-nupedian, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are suddenly in need of a major effort. I can promise you that a far greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden malware, etc.
Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some excusability for disruption to our customer projects.
But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal governance. We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of the deletions. There is no active discussion about making an improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship. Many other messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail.
I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will foster improved communication on the subject.
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Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
I apologize for the late reply, but since this issue is of a long term nature, hopefully not much harm will come from only commenting on it now.
I fully admit I experienced a "Hey, I resemble that remark!" moment regarding the middle part of the paragraph. My culture is certainly near the end of the spectrum mentioned, being as I am from Finland (if it tells you anything, we usually consider our neighbors to the west, the Swedes, as hopelessly repressed sexually --- and I am not even kidding)
While I am sure there are people to whom the whole paragraph applies fully in every respect (and I would imagine as you say they will likely be a vanishingly small percentage of the community), my personal angle to the issue is completely different, and I doubt I am alone.
I am not at all offended that people have the capacity to be offended by whatever gets their goat. I too have the capacity, but perhaps with respect to other things. I absolutely have no problem with that.
Personally what was offensive was not people not bowing down before my cultural values, so to speak. What *was* offensive however was that people from on high chose a matter of such obviously subjective import to privilege a *specific* standard of mores. Not the fact that it wasn't *mine*, but that it was a specific one.
This problem is compounded by the fact that such action hugely legitimizes the argument -- while being certainly untrue -- that Wikimedia is not genuinely an international project. *This* is the real issue that needs to be addressed, if any real progress is to be made, in healing most of the wounds the community has incurred.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Thank you for retaking the thread, Jussi-Ville. Please allow me to share some thoughts about attitudes on nudity, unneccessary provocation and Jimmy Wales' action.
I remember something I heard on "Wikipedia Weekly", a year ago or so, I believe it was even before the Virginkiller issue (the Scorpions' cover). Andrew Lih said that many Wikipedians laugh about pornography/nudity issues and have a laissez-faire-I-don't-care attitude. Like let the world think what it wants, we Wikipedians go simply on with what we doing.
Andrew Lih disqualified that attitude as immature and ignorant (sorry, I do not recall the precise words). People who have difficulties with nudity etc. are a legitimate part of our community and our readership and we should at least listen to them and try to find a compromise that does not hurt someone's feelings unnecessarily, even if in many points they would have to give in.
This came up in me again on March 21st, this year. A group arround Achim Raschka improved the article "Vulva" in German Wikipedia and promoted it through the procedure to make it "Article of the day". So on that Sunday, the Main page of German Wikipedia presented the article with an illustration. On a Wikipeda meeting on Cologne, then, I heard people grinning about "the dream of all puberal vandals came true: a pussy on Main page".
I was not sure what to think about that, but I come more and more the conclusion that it was an unneccessary provocation, at least the illustration. I know about some people who are honestly shocked by graphic nudity (some are religious, others not); so when they go to an article such as "vulva" or "fellatio" it is at their own risk, but they should not be confronted with a vulva picture at the Main page where they don't expect it.
This should apply, I think, also to other pictures people may find disturbing, for example about people deformed by deaseses or injuries. There are simply subjects and illustrations that are not like all others.
So when illustrating the article "Holocaust" you can and should use pictures of dead bodies [1], but for a link from the Main page it is preferred to use someting like the Entrance to Auschwitz [2].
Some Wikipedia commuties might want to have rules of their own, depending on the Wikipedians and the expected readership. I noticed that while German Wikipedia's article "Penis" has photographs, Arabic Wikipedia's is illustrated only by a medical drawing.
About the deletions on Commons in the last days: I cannot imagine that there were significant losses of valuable illustrations. But in general I wonder that a board member is deleting these pictures in person. In my humble opinion, if a community is late with important policy making, the board has all right to take action (as the board, or the Foundation, is finally responsable for the projects). But there should be a board decision, and the implementation should be left to a collaborator of Wikimedia Foundation. You would also find it strange seeing the Queen of England sweeping the streets of London in person, or handing you out a parking fine.
Maybe it is useful to install an extra community assistant for Commons, given the importance of Commons for all projects, with at the same time an inherent weakness of Commons because many Wikipedians use it but do not engage in it specifically.
Kind regards Ziko van Dijk
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_175-04413,_KZ_Auschwitz,... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mass_Grave_Bergen_Belsen_May_1945.jpg
2010/5/13 Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.com:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
I apologize for the late reply, but since this issue is of a long term nature, hopefully not much harm will come from only commenting on it now.
I fully admit I experienced a "Hey, I resemble that remark!" moment regarding the middle part of the paragraph. My culture is certainly near the end of the spectrum mentioned, being as I am from Finland (if it tells you anything, we usually consider our neighbors to the west, the Swedes, as hopelessly repressed sexually --- and I am not even kidding)
While I am sure there are people to whom the whole paragraph applies fully in every respect (and I would imagine as you say they will likely be a vanishingly small percentage of the community), my personal angle to the issue is completely different, and I doubt I am alone.
I am not at all offended that people have the capacity to be offended by whatever gets their goat. I too have the capacity, but perhaps with respect to other things. I absolutely have no problem with that.
Personally what was offensive was not people not bowing down before my cultural values, so to speak. What *was* offensive however was that people from on high chose a matter of such obviously subjective import to privilege a *specific* standard of mores. Not the fact that it wasn't *mine*, but that it was a specific one.
This problem is compounded by the fact that such action hugely legitimizes the argument -- while being certainly untrue -- that Wikimedia is not genuinely an international project. *This* is the real issue that needs to be addressed, if any real progress is to be made, in healing most of the wounds the community has incurred.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
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Ziko van Dijk wrote:
So when illustrating the article "Holocaust" you can and should use pictures of dead bodies [1], but for a link from the Main page it is preferred to use someting like the Entrance to Auschwitz [2].
Some Wikipedia commuties might want to have rules of their own, depending on the Wikipedians and the expected readership. I noticed that while German Wikipedia's article "Penis" has photographs, Arabic Wikipedia's is illustrated only by a medical drawing.
Here it is important that much more that an issue of cultural identity, these kinds of things are an issue of trends in time. Like the resurgence of the "moral majority" in the USA which has happened in the last few decades; Arabic cultures mores have shifted in time.
I had the privilege of listening to Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila who has made a special study of Arabic culture, discuss Arabic erotic poetry through-out the ages. During the Golden Age of Islam it was much more eclectic and permissively pluralistic than the Christian or Jewish cultures of the time, and its erotic poetry remarkably sensuous. The instructional manuals for sexual expression written at that time were much more explicit than today could find a publisher in the west.
About the deletions on Commons in the last days: I cannot imagine that there were significant losses of valuable illustrations. But in general I wonder that a board member is deleting these pictures in person. In my humble opinion, if a community is late with important policy making, the board has all right to take action (as the board, or the Foundation, is finally responsable for the projects). But there should be a board decision, and the implementation should be left to a collaborator of Wikimedia Foundation. You would also find it strange seeing the Queen of England sweeping the streets of London in person, or handing you out a parking fine.
The Queen did drive a truck during the blitz, though. I am not going to comment on whether the media-blitz by Fox News rises to the level of World War II in context.
Yours,
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
On 05/13/2010 09:36 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote:
During the Golden Age of Islam it was much more eclectic and permissively pluralistic than the Christian or Jewish cultures of the time [...]
Which reminds me of another interesting historical tidbit.
I was rummaging for story about Samuel Johnson and people hunting for naughty words in his dictionary, when I came across a Google Books reproduction of an 1896 periodical titled "The Homiletic Review", edited by I.K. Funk, of Funk and Wagnalls. It appears that a competitor to their dictionary culled the naughtiest bits from the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, used those to claim they were filth-mongers, and set out to create a giant hullabaloo.
What I quote below is a spirited defense of recording all the words as they are used. In the original, it's followed by a page of quotes from "scholars, teachers, and editors" applauding a neutral, uncensored reference work.
It's funny to see how little has changed.
A VILE ATTACK ON THE STANDARD DICTIONARY.
A grave wrong is being perpetrated by a reprinter of one of the English competitors of the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, assisted by some unscrupulous agents of other dictionaries—a wrong that cannot be excused by the exigencies of commercial rivalry. As is well known, in all unabridged dictionaries it is necessary to give the definitions of certain indelicate words. Eighteen of these words (selected out of a vocabulary of over 300,000 terms in the Standard) have been collected and printed with their definitions by the reprinter of this English dictionary, and circulars containing them are being distributed among teachers, school trustees, and parents all through this country, stirring up a filthy agitation that will end, unless frowned down by the public press and other leaders of public opinion, in setting people of prurient minds and children everywhere to searching dictionaries for this class of words. One of these publications contains such outrageously unjust comments as the following:
"About two years ago the publishing house of Funk & Wagnalls brought into the world a monstrosity entitled the Standard Dictionary of the English Language."
"So far as relates to its collection of obscene, filthy, blasphemous, slang, and profane words. It has no counterpart in dictionaries of the English Language."
It is but fair to the press and scholars of England to say that the English critics have in no way seconded this unfair assault, but are unanimous in the most unqualified endorsement of the American work, the standard Dictionary, expressing in many ways the same opinion as that of the St. James's Budget [weekly edition of the St. James's Gazette] London, which said:
" To say that it is perfect in form and scope is not extravagance of praise, and to say that it is the most valuable Dictionary of the English language is but to Repeat the obvious. The Standard Dictionary should be the pride of literary America as it Is the admiration of literary England."
The insincerity of this attack on the Standard is seen in the fact that nearly every one of these 18 words is in the English work published by this reprinter, and it contains other words so grossly indelicate and withal so rarely used as to have been excluded from the Standard and from nearly all the other dictionaries. Fifteen out of the eighteen words (and others of the came class) are, and properly so, in the Century Dictionary, and they are to be found, with scarcely an exception, in every other reputable unabridged dictionary, and this class of words is invariably recorded in the leading dictionaries of all languages.
Since this attack was made, we have submitted to Charles A. Dana and to a number of well-known educators the question whether we committed an error in admitting into the Standard, as have other dictionaries, this class of words. The answer has been without an exception, "You did not."
The fact is, extraordinary care was used by the editors of the Standard "to protect the language."
Of the more than 500,000 words collected by the hundreds of readers employed to search all books of merit from Chaucer's time to the present, over /300,000 were excluded wholly from the vocabulary/; hence there was no need to pad the vocabulary. The rules of exclusion and inclusion were most carefully made and rigidly enforced. A most perplexing problem from beginning to end was how to reduce the vocabulary, not how to enlarge it. Compression was carried by many devices to the extremest degree. The editors who passed upon the admission of words numbered over one hundred of the best known writers and scholars In America and England. To accuse such men of "filthiness" is to do a wrong of the gravest degree. It is the business of a dictionary to record words, not to create, nor to destroy them; to answer inquirers concerning the spelling, pronunciation, and meaning of all words that are used to any considerable extent, not to omit those it does not fancy. Whether a word has a right to exist or not, the final arbiter is the people, not the dictionary. The dictionary, as says Trench, should be the inventory of the language, and, as says the Encyclopedia Britannica under the term DICTIONARY, it "should include all of the words of the language. ... A complete and Standard Dictionary should make no choice. Words obsolete and newly coined, barbarous, vulgar, and affected, temporary, provincial, and local, belonging to peculiar classes, professions, pursuits, and trades, should all find their place,—the only question being as to the evidence of their existence,—not indeed, all received with equal honor and regard, but with their characteristics and defects duly noted and pointed out."
Improper or indelicate words, when it was necessary to admit them into the Standard, were blacklisted as /low, vulgar, slang/, and printed in small type. It did not seem to the editors that an unabridged dictionary could go further without justly incurring blame.
To collect from such a work words of the class referred to and publish them is as great an outrage as to collect from the Bible the many indelicate words and passages to be found there, or those from Shakespeare (some of these 18 words arc found both in the Bible and Shakespeare), and then to print and scatter abroad the collection, saying: " See what a foul book is the Bible; see what an obscene and blasphemous work is Shakespeare." The publication and distribution of these circulars is a gross assault on public decency. An agent who attempts to exhibit such a printed circular should not be listened to; he Is a public enemy, and should be turned from every decent door.
The old story will be remembered of a woman accosting Samuel Johnson, shortly after his dictionary had been published, with, "Doctor Johnson, I am so sorry that you put in your dictionary the naughty words." " Madam," retorted the doctor, " I am sorry that you have been looking for them."
from http://books.google.com/books?id=ebYnAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA2-PA49
William
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On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, William Pietri wrote:
I was rummaging for story about Samuel Johnson and people hunting for naughty words in his dictionary, when I came across a Google Books reproduction of an 1896 periodical titled "The Homiletic Review", edited by I.K. Funk, of Funk and Wagnalls. It appears that a competitor to their dictionary culled the naughtiest bits from the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary, used those to claim they were filth-mongers, and set out to create a giant hullabaloo.
Thank you so much for this historical perspective. It is indeed interesting to watch history repeat itself. I didn't know about this particular case before. I can only hope the Wiktionary communities have learned their history better than some others; otherwise perhaps they'll be next on the chopping block!
- --Mike
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