On 6/6/2010 2:57 PM, Mariano Cecowski wrote: I trust that at least the last part of this was meant as a joke, but I think it's worth a comment anyway. This is not so much related to usability or interlanguage links, but the larger issue some people have been highlighting about communication and culture. If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. For African-Americans online, talk about lynching is arguably more offensive than violations of Godwin's law. For me, this highlights some of the issues that make our culture much more closed than it should be. I think we are often far too careless in the tone and language we use with each other. We need to both be more careful in how we communicate, and more forgiving of those who inadvertently make mistakes in this area. I'm happy to forgive a comment about lynching made in ignorance of its connotations. In this discussion, there's been quite a bit of consternation about the attitude of the usability team, which seems to have grown largely out of a comment attached to the debated piece of code. I imagine the author may well regret it, but I don't think it should be seized upon in isolation from the productive dialogue I've seen. An administrator on the wiki might be a bit grumpy in an edit summary, too - that's not a good thing particularly, but not necessarily worth indicting the entire community, as some critics try to do. It happens, people are human, hence both fallible and capable of improving. Because of the race aspect, this is also a good opening to talk about diversity and cultural awareness. As a community, we are overwhelmingly white (to use the racial constructs of the US; to express it another way, of European ancestry). We manage to have a smattering of Asian people, of various ethnic groups. But some groups are effectively not involved at all, and the European and American flavor is very dominant. Because of how that shapes our interactions, is it any wonder that black people might not feel welcome among us? We may be perfectly innocent, as exemplified here, yet our culture can appear hostile to people of African descent. Similarly, we know that the community population skews young and male. That has important consequences, and some of those unfortunately reinforce our lack of diversity. It's been pointed out what a male-centric approach we sometimes have, in the enthusiasm and manner with which certain subjects are covered, and the oblivious attitude toward potential offensiveness of various images. This comes across to all too many women as a hostile culture. Most large online communities do not have the kind of gender imbalance we have. This is a serious issue we need to address. The foundation could do targeted outreach forever to recruit underrepresented groups (whether it's ethnicity, age, gender, or other factors), and it would accomplish very little without significant improvements in our culture. --Michael Snow

On 6/6/2010 9:03 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. (I assume you mean Kat, but she is not the only female board member.) I'm certainly not suggesting that. Sometimes it's easier to strongly argue positions that are counterintuitive to the role people might expect of you, because people are unlikely to suggest your convictions are skewed by your personal characteristics. I also think the focus on simple retention or deletion is almost a red herring sometimes, despite the conduct of another board member which basically framed the debate that way. The board's initial statement about educational images is kind of stuck there too, but we've been working on something a little more nuanced to come soon. In the meantime, I would encourage people to look at the discussion that's been happening on the Commons village pump regarding educational image use more generally. --Michael Snow

Hoi, The WMF has as its strategy to invest in what has the highest impact. Given limited resources that makes sense. It also means that while philosophically as volunteers we do not have to make such choices, the WMF will and does. It is obvious that depending on your point of view, the choices made by the WMF can be fortunate or less so. You are right that it is not in our mission to make choices, but reality is different. The question is what choices to make and what their likely impact is. This brings you to two competing fundamentals; what has the most effect and what is the period to measure those effects. Thanks, GerardM On 9 June 2010 09:12, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Hoi, Using words like "pellucid" I am afraid that the average Brit or Yank will have to look up what you are trying to say, let alone most people for whom English is a second or third language. If you are not able / willing to understand what my message to you was, I am happy to clear things up for you off list. Thanks, GerardM On 9 June 2010 12:01, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 3:01 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote: I adore the word "pellucid." But Gerard is right: simply put we can't and don't do everything. We don't make every piece of information available to every single person in the world -- yet. So what do we include in our collection, and why, and how do we make it possible for people to access the stuff we do have? These are the seemingly simple questions that we've spent 5000943945 F-l messages on discussing this month. And we will doubtless spend 67834920 more in discussing whether future policy on these points should necessarily derive from past practice, and who gets to decide. -- phoebe, who is repressing her opaque sarcasm

On 6/9/2010 12:12 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: My point has nothing to do with making things unavailable. There are other ways of supporting reader choice. As for the pretense that it's possible to sidestep value decisions about making or enabling choices, just by adopting "availability" as a default, that's simply wrong. The present situation involving interlanguage links is a perfect illustration of that. Regardless of which interface approach we adopted, the links were going to remain available, there was no thought that they would be deleted or that feature eliminated. The question is how they are going to be available, at what point we are going to present the reader with the choice, and what mechanisms will be used to enable those choices. Those are crucial questions to confront in our work, and they apply to much more than just interlanguage links, important as those are. --Michael Snow

On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen &lt;cimonavaro(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: <snip> Uh... much as I like Kat (and she's not the only female member, there's also Bishakha), singling out her view as representative of all women on the projects is, arguably, part of the problem. Are there so few women speaking up as part of the community discussion that this is really necessary? (One interesting exercise is to count the number of posts by women on this very list. Even controlling for pseudonyms and unknown variability, it's still around 1/10 or lower, a good number of which are from me. Many of the rest are from WMF staffers. Did you notice? I do, every time I post, and not just because I try to not excessively spam the list.) -- Phoebe

--- El dom 6-jun-10, Michael Snow &lt;wikipedia(a)verizon.net&gt; escribió: Michael, that was really off-topic, unnecessary, and a complete waste of bytes. When you write something sarcastically, the social connotations have zero relevance. I was ridiculing the excess of violence in the thread, that leads to nothing constructive. But then, perhaps the level of aggressiveness has reached a point where obvious sarcasm is taken literally? MarianoC.- PS: And to be fair; taking the lynching thing as a sensitive issue in USA is badly US centric; the term is used worldwide and in hundreds of languages, and has no necessary connection with black people.

--- On Mon, 6/7/10, Victor Vasiliev &lt;vasilvv(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: That post can only being seen as an example of "agressive disrespect of other cultures" by people who think happening to be born in the USA is an agressive disrespect of other cultures. Americans are people too! Birgitte SB

On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Chad &lt;innocentkiller(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This post can be seen as the list administrator asking everyone to be cool, don't go looking for things to be offended by, and try to keep what's already an obscenely long thread on-topic. Thanks! Austin

On 7 June 2010 14:55, Victor Vasiliev &lt;vasilvv(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Michael's post, by claiming inflammatory content that was not actually present at all, is the sort of thing that someone would post attempting to derail a discussion. I don't think that was his intent, but he still should have known better. - d.