Hi everyone,
We'd like to draw your attention to our recent amendment of the 2009 Biographies of Living People resolution. We have amended that resolution to refer to both text and media when considering articles or images of living people: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Media_about_living_people
We believe this amendment serves to clarify our original intent with this resolution, which is to urge the Wikimedia community to act with care when working with all portrayals of living people.
This amended resolution was passed at the November 2013 Board meeting.
For the Board of Trustees,
María
Hi Maria,
thanks for sharing. To appreciate the resolution in its proper context, I was wondering if you could share if there was a specific trigger to this amendment?
Best, Lodewijk
2013/12/11 María Sefidari kewlshrink@yahoo.es
Hi everyone,
We'd like to draw your attention to our recent amendment of the 2009 Biographies of Living People resolution. We have amended that resolution to refer to both text and media when considering articles or images of living people: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Media_about_living_people
We believe this amendment serves to clarify our original intent with this resolution, which is to urge the Wikimedia community to act with care when working with all portrayals of living people.
This amended resolution was passed at the November 2013 Board meeting.
For the Board of Trustees,
María
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Il 11/dic/2013 21:07 "Lodewijk" lodewijk@effeietsanders.org ha scritto:
Hi Maria,
thanks for sharing. To appreciate the resolution in its proper context, I was wondering if you could share if there was a specific trigger to this amendment?
I completely second the question.
Cristian.
On 11 December 2013 20:06, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
Hi Maria,
thanks for sharing. To appreciate the resolution in its proper context, I was wondering if you could share if there was a specific trigger to this amendment?
Please also provide a link to the consultation you carried out with the community, before making this change. I seem to have missed it.
Lodewijk wrote:
thanks for sharing. To appreciate the resolution in its proper context, I was wondering if you could share if there was a specific trigger to this amendment?
How about https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=111671264&oldid=102286853 (as rumour has it)?
Tomasz
I hope this is a coincidence. I have great difficulty believing that the WMF board of trustees passed a resolution imagining that it would appear to be a good thing that the *very first* action it is used for is to justify the deletion of an artwork of one of its own members.
Whatever else is going on here, this is unfortunately timed in a way that appears excessively pointy.
Fae
On 11 December 2013 21:53, Tomasz W. Kozlowski tomasz@twkozlowski.net wrote:
Lodewijk wrote:
thanks for sharing. To appreciate the resolution in its proper context, I was wondering if you could share if there was a specific trigger to this amendment?
How about https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?diff=111671264&oldid=102286853 (as rumour has it)?
Tomasz
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Fæ wrote:
I hope this is a coincidence.
How naive of you, Fæ: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=6705202#Personal_and_Moral_Righ...
Tomasz
"I would like to know where subjects can post their complaint besides on the talk page, since putting complaints there is still a form of publication and only serves to propagate the sensitive information that subjects want removed. - Jane Darnell"
Yes; we are working on it. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Photographs_of_identifiable_... and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Contact_us/Problems#Consent_...
Jee
On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz@twkozlowski.net
wrote:
Fæ wrote:
I hope this is a coincidence.
How naive of you, Fæ: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?oldid=6705202#Personal_and_Moral_Rights.3F
Tomasz
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Thanks Jee, I will try to keep my comments there
2013/12/12, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com:
"I would like to know where subjects can post their complaint besides on the talk page, since putting complaints there is still a form of publication and only serves to propagate the sensitive information that subjects want removed. - Jane Darnell"
Yes; we are working on it. See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Photographs_of_identifiable_... and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Contact_us/Problems#Consent_...
Jee
On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 2:35 PM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz@twkozlowski.net
wrote:
Fæ wrote:
I hope this is a coincidence.
How naive of you, Fæ: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?oldid=6705202#Personal_and_Moral_Rights.3F
Tomasz
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Thank you, Maria for passing this on, and to the Board of Trustees for adding wording to the resolution that more clearly conveys that WMF projects are creating content and acting as a repository for a broad range of media that have the potential to cause harm to living people.
Sydney Poore User:FloNight
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:20 PM, María Sefidari kewlshrink@yahoo.eswrote:
Hi everyone,
We'd like to draw your attention to our recent amendment of the 2009 Biographies of Living People resolution. We have amended that resolution to refer to both text and media when considering articles or images of living people: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Media_about_living_people
We believe this amendment serves to clarify our original intent with this resolution, which is to urge the Wikimedia community to act with care when working with all portrayals of living people.
This amended resolution was passed at the November 2013 Board meeting.
For the Board of Trustees,
María
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Thanks for this, but even with the amendments it sounds pretty weak. The closing text just shows how helpless we are in helping subjects when their article is under the watchful eye of some Wikipedia editor who feels that they "own" biography articles they have been watching for years. Though I support the intention behind this statement ("Treating any person who has a complaint about how they are portrayed in our projects with patience, kindness, and respect, and encouraging others to do the same"), it still offers no indication of a path forward for such subjects. I would like to know where subjects can post their complaint besides on the talk page, since putting complaints there is still a form of publication and only serves to propagate the sensitive information that subjects want removed. Also, the text coming after "People sometimes make edits or add media designed to smear others" also doesn't address the problem. There are lots of unnecessarily sensitive edits made that are not made maliciously, but if they are sourced, are practically impossible to have removed, if the "personal owner" disagrees. I guess for major TV personalities and such it may be easier because there are more people watching and editing such biographies, but in the case of marginally notable people, they have no recourse whatsoever, as far as I can see.
2013/12/11, Sydney Poore sydney.poore@gmail.com:
Thank you, Maria for passing this on, and to the Board of Trustees for adding wording to the resolution that more clearly conveys that WMF projects are creating content and acting as a repository for a broad range of media that have the potential to cause harm to living people.
Sydney Poore User:FloNight
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 12:20 PM, María Sefidari kewlshrink@yahoo.eswrote:
Hi everyone,
We'd like to draw your attention to our recent amendment of the 2009 Biographies of Living People resolution. We have amended that resolution to refer to both text and media when considering articles or images of living people: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Media_about_living_people
We believe this amendment serves to clarify our original intent with this resolution, which is to urge the Wikimedia community to act with care when working with all portrayals of living people.
This amended resolution was passed at the November 2013 Board meeting.
For the Board of Trustees,
María
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks for this, but even with the amendments it sounds pretty weak. The closing text just shows how helpless we are in helping subjects when their article is under the watchful eye of some Wikipedia editor who feels that they "own" biography articles they have been watching for years. Though I support the intention behind this statement ("Treating any person who has a complaint about how they are portrayed in our projects with patience, kindness, and respect, and encouraging others to do the same"), it still offers no indication of a path forward for such subjects. I would like to know where subjects can post their complaint besides on the talk page, since putting complaints there is still a form of publication and only serves to propagate the sensitive information that subjects want removed. Also, the text coming after "People sometimes make edits or add media designed to smear others" also doesn't address the problem. There are lots of unnecessarily sensitive edits made that are not made maliciously, but if they are sourced, are practically impossible to have removed, if the "personal owner" disagrees. I guess for major TV personalities and such it may be easier because there are more people watching and editing such biographies, but in the case of marginally notable people, they have no recourse whatsoever, as far as I can see.
All good and important questions, Jane -- and yes, all of this is left unaddressed in this resolution. As careful readers have noted, this is just a small update to the 2009 resolution, meant to clarify the Board's original intent. We did not change the other parts of the text or tackle the process-related parts of handling BLPs, which remains a hard issue -- although one that has been addressed by various policies and processes, such as our fantastic OTRS team.
BLPs remain one of our big challenges, and will continue to be so as long as Wikipedia is popular. With a nod to Andy's comment, as a community I think we may want to review our progress in the last few years on the BLP issue, and have a broad community consultation about where we are still falling short and ideas for going forward, given our constraints and changing environment of readers and editors.
-- Phoebe
On 12/12/13, 8:40 PM, phoebe ayers wrote:
BLPs remain one of our big challenges, and will continue to be so as long as Wikipedia is popular. With a nod to Andy's comment, as a community I think we may want to review our progress in the last few years on the BLP issue, and have a broad community consultation about where we are still falling short and ideas for going forward, given our constraints and changing environment of readers and editors.
A slightly broader study I'd be interested in that regard boils down to: are our BLPs any good? If the answer, as I suspect, is "sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't", can we say anything about how often, and in which kinds of cases?
Undue or unsourced negative information about living people is one aspect of that, and what most of the formal BLP-related policy, and the process around things like OTRS, is intended to address. The flipside is undue or unsourced *positive* information about living people: in comparison to biographies about non-living people, BLPs draw a huge proportion of puffed-up, COI, and sometimes outright paid editing.
Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases outside the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant third-party editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.
-Mark
On 12 December 2013 12:25, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Undue or unsourced negative information about living people is one aspect of that, and what most of the formal BLP-related policy, and the process around things like OTRS, is intended to address. The flipside is undue or unsourced *positive* information about living people: in comparison to biographies about non-living people, BLPs draw a huge proportion of puffed-up, COI, and sometimes outright paid editing.
Yes, I think hagiography is a problem on en:wp.
Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases outside the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant third-party editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.
I don't think this is, though - when people are this unambiguously famous, I think our biographies hold up in terms of content, even when the prose flows badly.
How would we measure this?
- d.
On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 5:16 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 12 December 2013 12:25, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Undue or unsourced negative information about living people is one
aspect of
that, and what most of the formal BLP-related policy, and the process
around
things like OTRS, is intended to address. The flipside is undue or
unsourced
*positive* information about living people: in comparison to biographies about non-living people, BLPs draw a huge proportion of puffed-up, COI,
and
sometimes outright paid editing.
Yes, I think hagiography is a problem on en:wp.
Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases
outside
the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant
third-party
editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.
I don't think this is, though - when people are this unambiguously famous, I think our biographies hold up in terms of content, even when the prose flows badly.
How would we measure this?
And how would you have any confidence in the results being representative? A sample that relies on some set of tags and categories to identify articles is going to miss those without those indicators, which could theoretically be a pretty large portion... And it's that group where you'll likely find the highest proportion of shit content, the result of obscurity.
On 12/12/13, 11:16 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 12 December 2013 12:25, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Between tendentious negative information and self-promoting positive information, I worry that the overall quality level of our biographies of living people ends up poor in a great many cases, especially cases outside the top tier of biographies visible enough to draw significant third-party editors (Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, that kind of thing). But it would be better to understand the problem, if it is one, in more detail.
I don't think this is, though - when people are this unambiguously famous, I think our biographies hold up in terms of content, even when the prose flows badly.
Perhaps I worded this badly; I think I actually agree with you, and was trying to say something similar. When people are famous enough that their biographies draw significant third-party editing, I think we actually *do* do an okay job. The prose of [[en:Barack Obama]] may not be ideal, but it's clearly not a puff piece written by his press secretary (on the one hand), nor a hit piece written by his political opponents (on the other). It's all the rest of the biographies of living people (which are a *lot*) where I worry our quality is poor. BLPs of people below the top tier of fame seem to attract a disproportionate amount of unfortunately motivated editing.
My main point is that I think we may have a big quality issue here, of being (so far) simply unable to cover a class of articles to a consistently high standard. Rather than a narrow issue of personal attacks solvable by more diligent application of OTRS responses and the like.
-Mark
On 12 December 2013 19:40, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
With a nod to Andy's comment, as a community I think we may want to review our progress in the last few years on the BLP issue, and have a broad community consultation about where we are still falling short and ideas for going forward, given our constraints and changing environment of readers and editors.
I didn't make a comment; I requested information:
"Please also provide a link to the consultation you carried out with the community, before making this change. I seem to have missed it."
Oddly, I seem to have missed the response, also.
On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
On 12 December 2013 19:40, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
With a nod to Andy's comment, as a community I think we may want to review our progress in the last few years on the BLP issue, and have a broad community consultation about where we are still falling short and ideas for going forward, given our constraints and changing environment of readers and editors.
I didn't make a comment; I requested information:
"Please also provide a link to the consultation you carried out with the community, before making this change. I seem to have missed it."Oddly, I seem to have missed the response, also.
Well, with such a pointed comment, I assumed you were trying to make a point about the value of community consultations, so that's what I responded to.
As Maria noted, this was prompted by a community request on the board noticeboard, which of course anyone is welcome to participate in. And as I noted, we saw a need to clarify what we intended in the earlier resolution -- not something that can really be determined by community consensus. So no, we didn't have a broad community consultation on this particular amendment, though I also don't think it was out of the blue; there have been many related discussions on Commons and Wikipedia over the years.
I was recently reminded by someone that we *did* have a general community consultation on the BLP issue as part of the strategy project -- there's still good info (and some broad recommendations to the board) here, which are worth reviewing if the topic is of interest: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Living_People
best, Phoebe
Thanks for that link, Phoebe!
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
Maybe such Wikipedians have a problem with the BLP person in real life, or is closely related to some person who has a problem with the BLP person, and maybe it is just some stubborn Wikipedian sticking to the WP guidelines and policies. In the words of Emerson, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers."
Whatever the reason, the result is always the same: the BLP person feels helpless and abandoned to the whims and fancies of the Wikipedian in question. Most times they don't even know enough to see that it is just one person behind their reverts, and see the problem as "Wikipedia, a bad place to have a page on".
The problem has accelerated since this discussion in 2010, however, because with all the cutbacks in journalism, Wikipedia has become the go-to place for information about such BLP's, unfortunately for them.
2013/12/14, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 4:23 PM, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
On 12 December 2013 19:40, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
With a nod to Andy's comment, as a community I think we may want to review our progress in the last few years on the BLP issue, and have a broad community consultation about where we are still falling short and ideas for going forward, given our constraints and changing environment of readers and editors.
I didn't make a comment; I requested information:
"Please also provide a link to the consultation you carried out with the community, before making this change. I seem to have missed it."Oddly, I seem to have missed the response, also.
Well, with such a pointed comment, I assumed you were trying to make a point about the value of community consultations, so that's what I responded to.
As Maria noted, this was prompted by a community request on the board noticeboard, which of course anyone is welcome to participate in. And as I noted, we saw a need to clarify what we intended in the earlier resolution -- not something that can really be determined by community consensus. So no, we didn't have a broad community consultation on this particular amendment, though I also don't think it was out of the blue; there have been many related discussions on Commons and Wikipedia over the years.
I was recently reminded by someone that we *did* have a general community consultation on the BLP issue as part of the strategy project -- there's still good info (and some broad recommendations to the board) here, which are worth reviewing if the topic is of interest: https://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Living_People
best, Phoebe
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Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers. All ten would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would be inadequate.
My own point of view is that our policies and procedures are actually pretty good on paper, but they're just very unevenly and inconsistently applied in the real world. The "Tier 1" biographies, such as those of Messrs Obama, Cameron, and Abbott are pretty safe from BLP hijinx, but there is a massive underbelly of poorly defended BLPs on minor celebrities, local politicians, and the like, which are not watched consistently and where hagiography or defamation can take root. This is why, while things like the BoT's declaration are not unwelcome, I feel that they don't have any practical effect in fixing the problem. All it takes is for one negatively written bio to slip through the net to do real harm to someone in the real world.
My preferred way of dealing with this on en.wp would be to massively tighten the notability criteria where they related to biographies of living or possibly living people, but this would no doubt be met with cries of "deletionism!". Indeed, I don't think it's possible to adequately address the issue on large projects like en.wp or commons without a massive cultural shift and sweeping changes to policy that would cause immense disruption in the community; something the BoT is understandably reluctant to do.
Cheers, Craig
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers. All ten would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would be inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
This resolution appears to be asking for verifiability regarding images of living people. We are going to need some clarity around what the board considers to be verifiability (how do we prove the photo was taken at a public event and it is real? etc), and whether that includes unidentifiable people.
"Ensuring that all projects in all languages that describe or show living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles;.."
On English Wikipedia we have some guidance regarding photos of living people, but I can't find anything relating to verifiability or neutrality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Original_images
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Images
Wikimedia Commons has a policy which rejects 'neutrality', and it doesnt have a verifiability policy.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Neutral_point_of_vi... https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_peopl...
Is there a discussion happening on Commons somewhere about the implications of this resolution?
My own point of view is that our policies and procedures are actually pretty good on paper, but they're just very unevenly and inconsistently applied in the real world. The "Tier 1" biographies, such as those of Messrs Obama, Cameron, and Abbott are pretty safe from BLP hijinx, but there is a massive underbelly of poorly defended BLPs on minor celebrities, local politicians, and the like, which are not watched consistently and where hagiography or defamation can take root. This is why, while things like the BoT's declaration are not unwelcome, I feel that they don't have any practical effect in fixing the problem. All it takes is for one negatively written bio to slip through the net to do real harm to someone in the real world.
I agree with you Craig up to here ..
My preferred way of dealing with this on en.wp would be to massively tighten the notability criteria where they related to biographies of living or possibly living people, but this would no doubt be met with cries of "deletionism!".
And agree your preferred approach could help. On English Wikipedia, I think we have an article/editor ratio problem, which is only getting worse as articles increase and editors leave, and is meaning watchlists are less useful to scan for problematic edits.
The test for this is what is the average length of time between an edit of an old page (e.g. created in 2005) to the point in time that the edit a) appears on a watchlist, or b) is viewed as a diff, or c) is loaded as a page view, or d) leads to another edit. Then compare those averages with the averages from a year before, to determine whether edits are slipping past watchlists and recentchanges. I'm guessing that the length of time from edit to (a) or (b) is increasing, while (c) may be decreasing as Wikipedia readership increases.
A smaller Wikipedia scope means there are less articles, with more editors watching and editing the pages the BLP problems appear on.
I think it is necessary to add here that FlaggedRevs (Pending Changes) also helps, as any BLP problems are held in a queue. The 'volume of edits' can be a problem with FlaggedRevs in practise, but a) the 'size.
Indeed, I don't think it's possible to adequately address the issue on large projects like en.wp or commons without a massive cultural shift and sweeping changes to policy that would cause immense disruption in the community; something the BoT is understandably reluctant to do.
Another way the board can get serious about this problem is to mandate that each project write a BLP management strategy that needs to be approved by the WMF board, which would involve some type of periodic review of all content. The strategy would differ for each project based on their policies, scope and the size of the project. e.g. Wikisources would need to review only unpublished sources added each year; Wikipedias using FlaggedRevs could do spot checks annually; Wikipedias which have chosen to not use FlaggedRevs would be required to come up with feasible alternative solutions to verify the existing BLPs are clean of significant BLP problems. Projects which failed to complete their periodic reviews of the content would be put into maintenance mode(s) until they have completed the review. e.g. The devs might be asked to disable 'creation of new pages in mainspace' on the wiki as a first step measure to focus the community on the task.
More generally, we should have tiers in the notability system, by which we agree that not everyone is as notable as Barack Obama, and therefore their 'living' bio should not contain every detail that is ever published. The lowest tier is bios about people with questionable notability or low notability and avoid publicity, such as (most) referees, sports people who only played a few matches, most academics, which should only include facts that are relevant to their notability and their brief appearances into 'public life'. On English Wikipedia, those articles should all be put under FlaggedRevs, and edits that increase the scope of the biography are rejected/held/not-approved until there is consensus on the talk page that the subject is notable enough that other aspects of their life are of general interest to understanding their achievements or actions which have become notable.
Perhaps not just yet, but Wikidata should bring new solutions to this problem. We may have more consensus to remove classes of living people biographies from Wikipedia as the basic details of their life can be placed into Wikidata.
For example, only a few of these referees deserve a proper 'biography' - for the others, their bio exists on Wikipedia only because it is useful to have a unique identifier for the person, and we like to record a list of a person's public appearances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_soccer_referees
In a few of those articles, there are unsourced claims that the referee made a significant mistake. Besides official honours awarded, there is not similar commentary describing all of the times that sports commentators spoke highly of the referees decisions. i.e. these articles are either BLP problems now, or will be in the future. A referees decisions are usually only relevant within the context of a match, and don't belong on their bio.
In almost every case, the details in those articles can be moved to claims in Wikidata once a few Wikidata properties are created, and a non-editable page could be automatically generated on Wikipedias to describe the subject and list the events the person appeared in.
"Is there a discussion happening on Commons somewhere about the implications of this resolution? - John Vandenberg"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Resolution:Media_abo...
Jee
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 10:24 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers. All
ten
would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would be inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
This resolution appears to be asking for verifiability regarding images of living people. We are going to need some clarity around what the board considers to be verifiability (how do we prove the photo was taken at a public event and it is real? etc), and whether that includes unidentifiable people.
"Ensuring that all projects in all languages that describe or show living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles;.."
On English Wikipedia we have some guidance regarding photos of living people, but I can't find anything relating to verifiability or neutrality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Original_images
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Images
Wikimedia Commons has a policy which rejects 'neutrality', and it doesnt have a verifiability policy.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Neutral_point_of_vi...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_peopl...
Is there a discussion happening on Commons somewhere about the implications of this resolution?
My own point of view is that our policies and procedures are actually pretty good on paper, but they're just very unevenly and inconsistently applied in the real world. The "Tier 1" biographies, such as those of Messrs Obama, Cameron, and Abbott are pretty safe from BLP hijinx, but there is a massive underbelly of poorly defended BLPs on minor
celebrities,
local politicians, and the like, which are not watched consistently and where hagiography or defamation can take root. This is why, while things like the BoT's declaration are not unwelcome, I feel that they don't have any practical effect in fixing the problem. All it takes is for one negatively written bio to slip through the net to do real harm to someone in the real world.
I agree with you Craig up to here ..
My preferred way of dealing with this on en.wp would be to massively tighten the notability criteria where they related to biographies of
living
or possibly living people, but this would no doubt be met with cries of "deletionism!".
And agree your preferred approach could help. On English Wikipedia, I think we have an article/editor ratio problem, which is only getting worse as articles increase and editors leave, and is meaning watchlists are less useful to scan for problematic edits.
The test for this is what is the average length of time between an edit of an old page (e.g. created in 2005) to the point in time that the edit a) appears on a watchlist, or b) is viewed as a diff, or c) is loaded as a page view, or d) leads to another edit. Then compare those averages with the averages from a year before, to determine whether edits are slipping past watchlists and recentchanges. I'm guessing that the length of time from edit to (a) or (b) is increasing, while (c) may be decreasing as Wikipedia readership increases.
A smaller Wikipedia scope means there are less articles, with more editors watching and editing the pages the BLP problems appear on.
I think it is necessary to add here that FlaggedRevs (Pending Changes) also helps, as any BLP problems are held in a queue. The 'volume of edits' can be a problem with FlaggedRevs in practise, but a) the 'size.
Indeed, I don't think it's possible to adequately address the issue on large projects like en.wp or commons without a massive cultural shift and sweeping changes to policy that would cause immense disruption in the community; something the BoT is understandably
reluctant
to do.
Another way the board can get serious about this problem is to mandate that each project write a BLP management strategy that needs to be approved by the WMF board, which would involve some type of periodic review of all content. The strategy would differ for each project based on their policies, scope and the size of the project. e.g. Wikisources would need to review only unpublished sources added each year; Wikipedias using FlaggedRevs could do spot checks annually; Wikipedias which have chosen to not use FlaggedRevs would be required to come up with feasible alternative solutions to verify the existing BLPs are clean of significant BLP problems. Projects which failed to complete their periodic reviews of the content would be put into maintenance mode(s) until they have completed the review. e.g. The devs might be asked to disable 'creation of new pages in mainspace' on the wiki as a first step measure to focus the community on the task.
More generally, we should have tiers in the notability system, by which we agree that not everyone is as notable as Barack Obama, and therefore their 'living' bio should not contain every detail that is ever published. The lowest tier is bios about people with questionable notability or low notability and avoid publicity, such as (most) referees, sports people who only played a few matches, most academics, which should only include facts that are relevant to their notability and their brief appearances into 'public life'. On English Wikipedia, those articles should all be put under FlaggedRevs, and edits that increase the scope of the biography are rejected/held/not-approved until there is consensus on the talk page that the subject is notable enough that other aspects of their life are of general interest to understanding their achievements or actions which have become notable.
Perhaps not just yet, but Wikidata should bring new solutions to this problem. We may have more consensus to remove classes of living people biographies from Wikipedia as the basic details of their life can be placed into Wikidata.
For example, only a few of these referees deserve a proper 'biography'
- for the others, their bio exists on Wikipedia only because it is
useful to have a unique identifier for the person, and we like to record a list of a person's public appearances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_soccer_referees
In a few of those articles, there are unsourced claims that the referee made a significant mistake. Besides official honours awarded, there is not similar commentary describing all of the times that sports commentators spoke highly of the referees decisions. i.e. these articles are either BLP problems now, or will be in the future. A referees decisions are usually only relevant within the context of a match, and don't belong on their bio.
In almost every case, the details in those articles can be moved to claims in Wikidata once a few Wikidata properties are created, and a non-editable page could be automatically generated on Wikipedias to describe the subject and list the events the person appeared in.
-- John Vandenberg
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
And an application at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Contact_us/Problems#Suggeste...
Jee
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 10:31 PM, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com wrote:
"Is there a discussion happening on Commons somewhere about the implications of this resolution? - John Vandenberg"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Resolution:Media_abo...
Jee
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 10:24 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.comwrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers. All
ten
would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would
be
inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
This resolution appears to be asking for verifiability regarding images of living people. We are going to need some clarity around what the board considers to be verifiability (how do we prove the photo was taken at a public event and it is real? etc), and whether that includes unidentifiable people.
"Ensuring that all projects in all languages that describe or show living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles;.."
On English Wikipedia we have some guidance regarding photos of living people, but I can't find anything relating to verifiability or neutrality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Original_images
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Images
Wikimedia Commons has a policy which rejects 'neutrality', and it doesnt have a verifiability policy.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Neutral_point_of_vi...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_peopl...
Is there a discussion happening on Commons somewhere about the implications of this resolution?
My own point of view is that our policies and procedures are actually pretty good on paper, but they're just very unevenly and inconsistently applied in the real world. The "Tier 1" biographies, such as those of Messrs Obama, Cameron, and Abbott are pretty safe from BLP hijinx, but there is a massive underbelly of poorly defended BLPs on minor
celebrities,
local politicians, and the like, which are not watched consistently and where hagiography or defamation can take root. This is why, while
things
like the BoT's declaration are not unwelcome, I feel that they don't
have
any practical effect in fixing the problem. All it takes is for one negatively written bio to slip through the net to do real harm to
someone
in the real world.
I agree with you Craig up to here ..
My preferred way of dealing with this on en.wp would be to massively tighten the notability criteria where they related to biographies of
living
or possibly living people, but this would no doubt be met with cries of "deletionism!".
And agree your preferred approach could help. On English Wikipedia, I think we have an article/editor ratio problem, which is only getting worse as articles increase and editors leave, and is meaning watchlists are less useful to scan for problematic edits.
The test for this is what is the average length of time between an edit of an old page (e.g. created in 2005) to the point in time that the edit a) appears on a watchlist, or b) is viewed as a diff, or c) is loaded as a page view, or d) leads to another edit. Then compare those averages with the averages from a year before, to determine whether edits are slipping past watchlists and recentchanges. I'm guessing that the length of time from edit to (a) or (b) is increasing, while (c) may be decreasing as Wikipedia readership increases.
A smaller Wikipedia scope means there are less articles, with more editors watching and editing the pages the BLP problems appear on.
I think it is necessary to add here that FlaggedRevs (Pending Changes) also helps, as any BLP problems are held in a queue. The 'volume of edits' can be a problem with FlaggedRevs in practise, but a) the 'size.
Indeed, I don't think it's possible to adequately address the issue on large projects like en.wp or commons without a massive cultural shift and sweeping changes to policy that would cause immense disruption in the community; something the BoT is understandably
reluctant
to do.
Another way the board can get serious about this problem is to mandate that each project write a BLP management strategy that needs to be approved by the WMF board, which would involve some type of periodic review of all content. The strategy would differ for each project based on their policies, scope and the size of the project. e.g. Wikisources would need to review only unpublished sources added each year; Wikipedias using FlaggedRevs could do spot checks annually; Wikipedias which have chosen to not use FlaggedRevs would be required to come up with feasible alternative solutions to verify the existing BLPs are clean of significant BLP problems. Projects which failed to complete their periodic reviews of the content would be put into maintenance mode(s) until they have completed the review. e.g. The devs might be asked to disable 'creation of new pages in mainspace' on the wiki as a first step measure to focus the community on the task.
More generally, we should have tiers in the notability system, by which we agree that not everyone is as notable as Barack Obama, and therefore their 'living' bio should not contain every detail that is ever published. The lowest tier is bios about people with questionable notability or low notability and avoid publicity, such as (most) referees, sports people who only played a few matches, most academics, which should only include facts that are relevant to their notability and their brief appearances into 'public life'. On English Wikipedia, those articles should all be put under FlaggedRevs, and edits that increase the scope of the biography are rejected/held/not-approved until there is consensus on the talk page that the subject is notable enough that other aspects of their life are of general interest to understanding their achievements or actions which have become notable.
Perhaps not just yet, but Wikidata should bring new solutions to this problem. We may have more consensus to remove classes of living people biographies from Wikipedia as the basic details of their life can be placed into Wikidata.
For example, only a few of these referees deserve a proper 'biography'
- for the others, their bio exists on Wikipedia only because it is
useful to have a unique identifier for the person, and we like to record a list of a person's public appearances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_soccer_referees
In a few of those articles, there are unsourced claims that the referee made a significant mistake. Besides official honours awarded, there is not similar commentary describing all of the times that sports commentators spoke highly of the referees decisions. i.e. these articles are either BLP problems now, or will be in the future. A referees decisions are usually only relevant within the context of a match, and don't belong on their bio.
In almost every case, the details in those articles can be moved to claims in Wikidata once a few Wikidata properties are created, and a non-editable page could be automatically generated on Wikipedias to describe the subject and list the events the person appeared in.
-- John Vandenberg
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Thanks Jee for those links. It strikes me as odd that on a Commons:Contact us page there is no link to any explanation about how it all works. In my (limited!) experience of helping BLP subjects, it has helped them enormously just to talk about how Wikipedia works. Sometimes they are certain that some family member is making revenge edits, and just by showing them the user pages of the editors who made the problematic edits, they are often very relieved. Looking at history pages, discussion pages, and user pages is all very easy for Wikipedians, but most BLP subjects have no clue and go ballistic over something that might be trivial to fix. Instead of reducing our content-intake, we should try to help people to help themselves more by teaching them how to discover who made their page, who posted comments or pictures to that page, and how to contact those users either on their talk page or through the "email this user" feature.
2013/12/14, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com:
And an application at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Contact_us/Problems#Suggeste...
Jee
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 10:31 PM, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com wrote:
"Is there a discussion happening on Commons somewhere about the implications of this resolution? - John Vandenberg"
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Resolution:Media_abo...
Jee
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 10:24 PM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.comwrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers. All
ten
would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would
be
inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
This resolution appears to be asking for verifiability regarding images of living people. We are going to need some clarity around what the board considers to be verifiability (how do we prove the photo was taken at a public event and it is real? etc), and whether that includes unidentifiable people.
"Ensuring that all projects in all languages that describe or show living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles;.."
On English Wikipedia we have some guidance regarding photos of living people, but I can't find anything relating to verifiability or neutrality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Original_images
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons#Images
Wikimedia Commons has a policy which rejects 'neutrality', and it doesnt have a verifiability policy.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Project_scope/Neutral_point_of_vi...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_peopl...
Is there a discussion happening on Commons somewhere about the implications of this resolution?
My own point of view is that our policies and procedures are actually pretty good on paper, but they're just very unevenly and inconsistently applied in the real world. The "Tier 1" biographies, such as those of Messrs Obama, Cameron, and Abbott are pretty safe from BLP hijinx, but there is a massive underbelly of poorly defended BLPs on minor
celebrities,
local politicians, and the like, which are not watched consistently and where hagiography or defamation can take root. This is why, while
things
like the BoT's declaration are not unwelcome, I feel that they don't
have
any practical effect in fixing the problem. All it takes is for one negatively written bio to slip through the net to do real harm to
someone
in the real world.
I agree with you Craig up to here ..
My preferred way of dealing with this on en.wp would be to massively tighten the notability criteria where they related to biographies of
living
or possibly living people, but this would no doubt be met with cries of "deletionism!".
And agree your preferred approach could help. On English Wikipedia, I think we have an article/editor ratio problem, which is only getting worse as articles increase and editors leave, and is meaning watchlists are less useful to scan for problematic edits.
The test for this is what is the average length of time between an edit of an old page (e.g. created in 2005) to the point in time that the edit a) appears on a watchlist, or b) is viewed as a diff, or c) is loaded as a page view, or d) leads to another edit. Then compare those averages with the averages from a year before, to determine whether edits are slipping past watchlists and recentchanges. I'm guessing that the length of time from edit to (a) or (b) is increasing, while (c) may be decreasing as Wikipedia readership increases.
A smaller Wikipedia scope means there are less articles, with more editors watching and editing the pages the BLP problems appear on.
I think it is necessary to add here that FlaggedRevs (Pending Changes) also helps, as any BLP problems are held in a queue. The 'volume of edits' can be a problem with FlaggedRevs in practise, but a) the 'size.
Indeed, I don't think it's possible to adequately address the issue on large projects like en.wp or commons without a massive cultural shift and sweeping changes to policy that would cause immense disruption in the community; something the BoT is understandably
reluctant
to do.
Another way the board can get serious about this problem is to mandate that each project write a BLP management strategy that needs to be approved by the WMF board, which would involve some type of periodic review of all content. The strategy would differ for each project based on their policies, scope and the size of the project. e.g. Wikisources would need to review only unpublished sources added each year; Wikipedias using FlaggedRevs could do spot checks annually; Wikipedias which have chosen to not use FlaggedRevs would be required to come up with feasible alternative solutions to verify the existing BLPs are clean of significant BLP problems. Projects which failed to complete their periodic reviews of the content would be put into maintenance mode(s) until they have completed the review. e.g. The devs might be asked to disable 'creation of new pages in mainspace' on the wiki as a first step measure to focus the community on the task.
More generally, we should have tiers in the notability system, by which we agree that not everyone is as notable as Barack Obama, and therefore their 'living' bio should not contain every detail that is ever published. The lowest tier is bios about people with questionable notability or low notability and avoid publicity, such as (most) referees, sports people who only played a few matches, most academics, which should only include facts that are relevant to their notability and their brief appearances into 'public life'. On English Wikipedia, those articles should all be put under FlaggedRevs, and edits that increase the scope of the biography are rejected/held/not-approved until there is consensus on the talk page that the subject is notable enough that other aspects of their life are of general interest to understanding their achievements or actions which have become notable.
Perhaps not just yet, but Wikidata should bring new solutions to this problem. We may have more consensus to remove classes of living people biographies from Wikipedia as the basic details of their life can be placed into Wikidata.
For example, only a few of these referees deserve a proper 'biography'
- for the others, their bio exists on Wikipedia only because it is
useful to have a unique identifier for the person, and we like to record a list of a person's public appearances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Australian_soccer_referees
In a few of those articles, there are unsourced claims that the referee made a significant mistake. Besides official honours awarded, there is not similar commentary describing all of the times that sports commentators spoke highly of the referees decisions. i.e. these articles are either BLP problems now, or will be in the future. A referees decisions are usually only relevant within the context of a match, and don't belong on their bio.
In almost every case, the details in those articles can be moved to claims in Wikidata once a few Wikidata properties are created, and a non-editable page could be automatically generated on Wikipedias to describe the subject and list the events the person appeared in.
-- John Vandenberg
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 8:54 AM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
This resolution appears to be asking for verifiability regarding images of living people. We are going to need some clarity around what the board considers to be verifiability (how do we prove the photo was taken at a public event and it is real? etc), and whether that includes unidentifiable people.
"Ensuring that all projects in all languages that describe or show living people have policies in place calling for special attention to the principles of neutrality and verifiability in those articles;.."
Hi John,
I think this is an interesting point, but I'm not entirely sure I follow.... don't we always worry about verifiability for images? We certainly try to ensure that images are real and correctly identified and not in copyright, etc. If someone uploads a random photo of someone and says it's a picture of a celebrity, I feel like we [Commons editors] would check that out. Not so?
-- phoebe
On 14.12.2013 21:28, phoebe ayers wrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 8:54 AM, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
Hi John,
I think this is an interesting point, but I'm not entirely sure I follow.... don't we always worry about verifiability for images? We certainly try to ensure that images are real and correctly identified and not in copyright, etc. If someone uploads a random photo of someone and says it's a picture of a celebrity, I feel like we [Commons editors] would check that out. Not so?
-- phoebe
Sure, but what if someone uploads a photo of a celebrity and an unidentified person (which happens a lot)?
Cheers Yaroslav
On 15 December 2013 02:54, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers. All
ten
would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would be inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
Part of the problem in my view is that there is no notability requirements for identifiable persons appearing in images. While in the great majority of cases this is not really a problem, it does lead to very problematic things like pictures of people in states of undress, engaging in sexual activity, or doing something else their employer, family or local community might not be okay with, without any evidence of ongoing consent for that image to remain available. The only mechanism for getting rid of these is effectively for the subject of the image to email a stranger, provide evidence that they're the person in the image, ask nicely for it to be taken down, and hope to hell that the person is reasonable and doesn't play the "It's educational and under a free licence, sorry!" card. This is an issue that needs to be addressed because the status quo is entirely unsatisfactory.
Of course, the immediate reaction on Commons to this seems to be Wikilawyering as to whether the resolution applies to galleries or not. Given that the BoT's intent is clearly that this should apply to everything, everywhere on all Wikimedia projects, this doesn't fill me with a great deal of hope that the Commons community as a whole is capable of adequately dealing with this.
Cheers, Craig
Craig, Phoebe, and Yaroslav, those are all very good points. Until Google improves its image-recognition software, most photos appearing in google images are triggered by text in the image description. It should be easy to tag problematic image desriptions, especially when more people than the subject are recognizable in the photo. Certainly identification of people in the text is completely unnecessary if they are non-notable, so introducing "tiers of notability" might be an interesting idea (though someone marginally notable in the US is probably not notable elsewhere and the other way around)
I still think that we need more discovery tools to allow people (BLP subjects and their extended contacts) to find out more about the text or photo they are interested in. We should do a lot more on complaint prevention, because as Phoebe said, we just don't have enough time to handle the complaints.
2013/12/15, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net:
On 15 December 2013 02:54, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia users swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers. All
ten
would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would be inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
Part of the problem in my view is that there is no notability requirements for identifiable persons appearing in images. While in the great majority of cases this is not really a problem, it does lead to very problematic things like pictures of people in states of undress, engaging in sexual activity, or doing something else their employer, family or local community might not be okay with, without any evidence of ongoing consent for that image to remain available. The only mechanism for getting rid of these is effectively for the subject of the image to email a stranger, provide evidence that they're the person in the image, ask nicely for it to be taken down, and hope to hell that the person is reasonable and doesn't play the "It's educational and under a free licence, sorry!" card. This is an issue that needs to be addressed because the status quo is entirely unsatisfactory.
Of course, the immediate reaction on Commons to this seems to be Wikilawyering as to whether the resolution applies to galleries or not. Given that the BoT's intent is clearly that this should apply to everything, everywhere on all Wikimedia projects, this doesn't fill me with a great deal of hope that the Commons community as a whole is capable of adequately dealing with this.
Cheers, Craig _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hoi, I am really interested in how you think this will work out when Commons is going to use Wikidata. The planning is that in half a year the Wikidata team will start work on implementing something for Commons. It will include tagging. So for me a picture will be tagged and indicate who is in a picture. Consequently a person can be found in any language as long as you get the spelling right.
As it is there are plenty of people of questionable notability in Wikidata and at the same time there are plenty notable people from many countries lacking. If the same criteria for notability for Americans is used for the rest of the world... the number of people known to Wikidata will grow a lot bigger. Thanks, GerardM
On 15 December 2013 10:24, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Craig, Phoebe, and Yaroslav, those are all very good points. Until Google improves its image-recognition software, most photos appearing in google images are triggered by text in the image description. It should be easy to tag problematic image desriptions, especially when more people than the subject are recognizable in the photo. Certainly identification of people in the text is completely unnecessary if they are non-notable, so introducing "tiers of notability" might be an interesting idea (though someone marginally notable in the US is probably not notable elsewhere and the other way around)
I still think that we need more discovery tools to allow people (BLP subjects and their extended contacts) to find out more about the text or photo they are interested in. We should do a lot more on complaint prevention, because as Phoebe said, we just don't have enough time to handle the complaints.
2013/12/15, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net:
On 15 December 2013 02:54, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia
users
swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers.
All
ten
would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would be inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
Part of the problem in my view is that there is no notability
requirements
for identifiable persons appearing in images. While in the great
majority
of cases this is not really a problem, it does lead to very problematic things like pictures of people in states of undress, engaging in sexual activity, or doing something else their employer, family or local
community
might not be okay with, without any evidence of ongoing consent for that image to remain available. The only mechanism for getting rid of these
is
effectively for the subject of the image to email a stranger, provide evidence that they're the person in the image, ask nicely for it to be taken down, and hope to hell that the person is reasonable and doesn't
play
the "It's educational and under a free licence, sorry!" card. This is an issue that needs to be addressed because the status quo is entirely unsatisfactory.
Of course, the immediate reaction on Commons to this seems to be Wikilawyering as to whether the resolution applies to galleries or not. Given that the BoT's intent is clearly that this should apply to everything, everywhere on all Wikimedia projects, this doesn't fill me
with
a great deal of hope that the Commons community as a whole is capable of adequately dealing with this.
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Well I was thinking of only tagging pictures that are controversial, but of course you could tag everything, I suppose. It would be simpler to tag categories, that way you have semi-automatic tagging of pictures of the top-tier (the Obama-tier and above) without having any problematic names in the description, and anything below that, well, we probably don't have those pictures in categories anyway, and we also don't really care if the names are on there or not,
2013/12/15, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, I am really interested in how you think this will work out when Commons is going to use Wikidata. The planning is that in half a year the Wikidata team will start work on implementing something for Commons. It will include tagging. So for me a picture will be tagged and indicate who is in a picture. Consequently a person can be found in any language as long as you get the spelling right.
As it is there are plenty of people of questionable notability in Wikidata and at the same time there are plenty notable people from many countries lacking. If the same criteria for notability for Americans is used for the rest of the world... the number of people known to Wikidata will grow a lot bigger. Thanks, GerardM
On 15 December 2013 10:24, Jane Darnell jane023@gmail.com wrote:
Craig, Phoebe, and Yaroslav, those are all very good points. Until Google improves its image-recognition software, most photos appearing in google images are triggered by text in the image description. It should be easy to tag problematic image desriptions, especially when more people than the subject are recognizable in the photo. Certainly identification of people in the text is completely unnecessary if they are non-notable, so introducing "tiers of notability" might be an interesting idea (though someone marginally notable in the US is probably not notable elsewhere and the other way around)
I still think that we need more discovery tools to allow people (BLP subjects and their extended contacts) to find out more about the text or photo they are interested in. We should do a lot more on complaint prevention, because as Phoebe said, we just don't have enough time to handle the complaints.
2013/12/15, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net:
On 15 December 2013 02:54, John Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 6:08 PM, Craig Franklin cfranklin@halonetwork.net wrote:
Hi Jane,
I am concerned about the issue surrounding the comment "the real BLP
problems happen when heavyweight (in edit count terms) Wikipedia
users
swing their weight around"
I think the problem is that if you ask ten different people about the reason why we have BLP problems, you'll get ten different answers.
All
ten
would probably have some truth in them, but any one in isolation would be inadequate.
The list of problems becomes even longer for images.
The 2009 resolution on biographies of living people was about identifiable people, given they were the subject of a biography. This new 'media about living people' resolution doesn't make any such distinction for media, which I guess will result in lots of confusion about whether the scope includes images of unidentifiable people. It should, but ...
Part of the problem in my view is that there is no notability
requirements
for identifiable persons appearing in images. While in the great
majority
of cases this is not really a problem, it does lead to very problematic things like pictures of people in states of undress, engaging in sexual activity, or doing something else their employer, family or local
community
might not be okay with, without any evidence of ongoing consent for that image to remain available. The only mechanism for getting rid of these
is
effectively for the subject of the image to email a stranger, provide evidence that they're the person in the image, ask nicely for it to be taken down, and hope to hell that the person is reasonable and doesn't
play
the "It's educational and under a free licence, sorry!" card. This is an issue that needs to be addressed because the status quo is entirely unsatisfactory.
Of course, the immediate reaction on Commons to this seems to be Wikilawyering as to whether the resolution applies to galleries or not. Given that the BoT's intent is clearly that this should apply to everything, everywhere on all Wikimedia projects, this doesn't fill me
with
a great deal of hope that the Commons community as a whole is capable of adequately dealing with this.
Cheers, Craig _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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On 14 December 2013 00:30, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
I didn't make a comment; I requested information:
"Please also provide a link to the consultation you carried out with the community, before making this change. I seem to have missed it."Oddly, I seem to have missed the response, also.
Well, with such a pointed comment, I assumed you were trying to make a point about the value of community consultations, so that's what I responded to.
To reiterate, I didn't make a comment; I requested information.
[...]
So no, we didn't have a broad community consultation on this particular amendment
Thank you for making that clear.
there have been many related discussions on Commons and Wikipedia over the years.
Indeed there have. But until a widely-advertised consultation is held (advertised in the manner of the recent discussion on logos and branding), we wont know the views of the community at large, rather than those who have an axe to grind. We won't know, for instance, whether the amendment goes too far, or not far enough, in reflecting the communities wishes.
Well I don't see any problem with starting off by taking a survey among OTRS users, or in trying to collect data to classify problems that are reported. Once we know what the "popular problems" are, can we better help stop the flow of unwanted trash-talking on BLP's.
I think the "underbelly" that we all agree is problematic, could be a lot less problematic if we kept the BLP's in that underbelly to only mention the names of other living people if they are also on Wikipedia. Often the names and activities of non-notable living people such as former spouses, children, parents, and other related people slip in to those BLPs in an unnecessary way. Those people are not always thrilled to see their names on Wikipedia...
2013/12/14, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk:
On 14 December 2013 00:30, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
I didn't make a comment; I requested information:
"Please also provide a link to the consultation you carried out with the community, before making this change. I seem to have missed it."Oddly, I seem to have missed the response, also.
Well, with such a pointed comment, I assumed you were trying to make a point about the value of community consultations, so that's what I responded to.
To reiterate, I didn't make a comment; I requested information.
[...]
So no, we didn't have a broad community consultation on this particular amendment
Thank you for making that clear.
there have been many related discussions on Commons and Wikipedia over the years.
Indeed there have. But until a widely-advertised consultation is held (advertised in the manner of the recent discussion on logos and branding), we wont know the views of the community at large, rather than those who have an axe to grind. We won't know, for instance, whether the amendment goes too far, or not far enough, in reflecting the communities wishes.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
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Andy Mabbett wrote:
Indeed there have. But until a widely-advertised consultation is held (advertised in the manner of the recent discussion on logos and branding), we wont know the views of the community at large, rather than those who have an axe to grind.
Your logic here is broken. There are certainly times to have widely advertised discussions, but doing so is not free: they often require creating and deploying banners (with an associated increased risk of banner blindness), related mailing list posts, time taken to draft and re-draft proposals, and, of course, the time taken by members of the community to discuss and re-discuss how best to move forward. Time is precious, especially volunteer time, so we should make every effort to ensure that when we ask people to donate theirs to a global discussion, we don't do so lightly. In this case, nobody has made a case that this small amendment to a previous resolution required a global discussion. Generally speaking, implementing common sense does not.
We won't know, for instance, whether the amendment goes too far, or not far enough, in reflecting the communities wishes.
I think what you're saying here is neither fair nor accurate. We know that the amendment doesn't go too far because we can read it and evaluate it. The underlying issue here is that Commons is plagued by a community that needs to get its house in order. I'm certainly not alone in this view. Passing the biographies of living persons resolution without explicitly mentioning media was probably a small oversight, in hindsight, though it's a bit disheartening that the spirit of the resolution couldn't carry the day and that the Board felt it necessary to explicitly dictate what common sense was already saying. It's perhaps ironic that Commons seems to hold common sense in such short supply. :-)
As for these theoretical objections, if _you_ or anyone else objects to this amendment, I'd certainly be interested to read why. Positing that someone could have objected in the event of a global community discussion in an alternate universe, while an enjoyable weekend activity, isn't actually the same as objections actively being raised against this amendment.
Resolutions, as this amendment itself explicitly demonstrates, can be modified, as necessary and appropriate. This is also not to be done lightly or carelessly, but nothing is permanently and indefinitely "set in stone" should there be legitimate reasons to modify a previous resolution. As it stands, this is operative global policy and Commons and every other project must respect it or exercise its right to fork.
MZMcBride
On 14 December 2013 15:55, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Andy Mabbett wrote:
until a widely-advertised consultation is held (advertised in the manner of the recent discussion on logos and branding), we wont know the views of the community at large, rather than those who have an axe to grind.
Your logic here is broken.
Charmed, I'm sure.
[Snip opinion which in no way demonstrates broken logic]
We won't know, for instance, whether the amendment goes too far, >> or not far enough, in reflecting the communities wishes.
I think what you're saying here is neither fair nor accurate.
In that I should have written "community's", or arguably, "communities'", perhaps. But not otherwise.
[Snip more opinion]
On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 7:55 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Your logic here is broken. There are certainly times to have widely advertised discussions, but doing so is not free: they often require creating and deploying banners (with an associated increased risk of banner blindness), related mailing list posts, time taken to draft and re-draft proposals, and, of course, the time taken by members of the community to discuss and re-discuss how best to move forward. Time is precious, especially volunteer time, so we should make every effort to ensure that when we ask people to donate theirs to a global discussion, we don't do so lightly.
Yes, I agree.
Our discussions are important, but they are not free in terms of our collective time. Let's take this particular thread as an example -- it's some 30 messages. Say it takes 15 minutes to read all of them, and 500 subscribers have done so. That's 125 person-hours reading this single thread alone -- or 15 people for an entire 8 hour workday. 15 very experienced Wikimedians spending a day can get a lot done :)
I don't think this particularly resolution warranted community consultation; if I did, I would have pushed for it. The issue of how to go ahead with BLPs in general certainly does, though -- that's the point I was trying to make.
As for these theoretical objections, if _you_ or anyone else objects to this amendment, I'd certainly be interested to read why.
Seconded.
cheers, Phoebe
11/dic/2013 21:07 "Lodewijk" <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org> ha escrito:
Hi Maria, thanks for sharing. To appreciate the resolution in its proper context, I was wondering if you could share if there was a specific trigger to this amendment?
I completely second the question. Cristian.
Hi Lodewijk and Cristian,
Sure. It was prompted by a request at the Board Noticeboard on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard#Perso...
Kind regards,
María
Thanks for the pointer. I'm glad to see it was a community request triggering this - not because of this specific amendment, but because it proofs that it matters what people write on those places :)
(just for the record: I'm not particularly against this amendment, I actually never assumed that files would be treated differently from texts anyway in this kind of stuff. Just plain curiosity.)
Best, Lodewijk
2013/12/11 María Sefidari kewlshrink@yahoo.es
11/dic/2013 21:07 "Lodewijk" <lodewijk at effeietsanders.org> ha escrito:
Hi Maria, thanks for sharing. To appreciate the resolution in its
proper context, I was wondering if you could share if there was a specific trigger to this amendment?
I completely second the question. Cristian.
Hi Lodewijk and Cristian,
Sure. It was prompted by a request at the Board Noticeboard on Meta: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_noticeboard#Perso...
Kind regards,
María _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On Wed, Dec 11, 2013 at 3:10 PM, Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org wrote:
(just for the record: I'm not particularly against this amendment, I actually never assumed that files would be treated differently from texts anyway in this kind of stuff. Just plain curiosity.)
Neither did the board, which is why we passed the amendment -- because there seemed to be some confusion on the matter :)
My take on the resolution -- not formally speaking for the board -- is what I said on Commons: that the board feels Wikimedians should exercise equal care when dealing with all portrayals of living people on our various projects. So while the resolution is not meant to drive to a very specific change and was not in response to any single incident, it is meant as a statement of principles that we can use to guide the development of process and policy -- and as with our past resolution about images of individual people, I think we should examine our policies and decisions in light of these principles.
best, Phoebe
While I appreciate the lengthy discussion about the scope of the resolution and about the ways it can be implemented in on-wiki processes, I would like to raise a different question.
I note with some interest that Jimmy's vote is not recorded at https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Media_about_living_people, and I wonder what are the exact reasons behind that, and how this lack of information relates to a March 30, 2012 resolution on Board of Trustees Voting Transparency, https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency.
Perhaps it might also be worth mentioning that there are two additional resolutions approved after March 30, 2012 that do not comply with the Voting Transparency resolution:
* https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Stu_West_reappointment_2013 * https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Jan-Bart_de_Vreede_reappointment_2013
I believe that the Board or Foundation lawyers might want to have a look at those.
Tomasz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_151#Resolution:M...
Hope this helps.
Jee
On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 1:16 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski <tomasz@twkozlowski.net
wrote:
While I appreciate the lengthy discussion about the scope of the resolution and about the ways it can be implemented in on-wiki processes, I would like to raise a different question.
I note with some interest that Jimmy's vote is not recorded at < https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Media_about_living_people%3E, and I wonder what are the exact reasons behind that, and how this lack of information relates to a March 30, 2012 resolution on Board of Trustees Voting Transparency, https://wikimediafoundation. org/wiki/Resolution:Board_of_Trustees_Voting_Transparency.
Perhaps it might also be worth mentioning that there are two additional resolutions approved after March 30, 2012 that do not comply with the Voting Transparency resolution:
reappointment_2013>
de_Vreede_reappointment_2013>
I believe that the Board or Foundation lawyers might want to have a look at those.
Tomasz
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On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 11:46 AM, Tomasz W. Kozlowski tomasz@twkozlowski.net wrote:
While I appreciate the lengthy discussion about the scope of the resolution and about the ways it can be implemented in on-wiki processes, I would like to raise a different question.
I note with some interest that Jimmy's vote is not recorded at https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Media_about_living_people, and I wonder what are the exact reasons behind that
He was only able to attend part of the meeting and so missed this vote -- he should have been marked as absent.
-- phoebe
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