Message: 9 Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:11:08 -0500 From: William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com Subject: [Wikitech-l] Overzealous Commons deletionists To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org, info@wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4EBE7E7C.8070708@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I've noticed a problem with overzealous deletionists on Commons. While this may be something of a legal and political issue, it's also operational and affects multiple *[m,p]edias at the same time.
[snip]
There are a number of obvious technical issues. YouTube and others have had to handle this, it's time for us.
- DMCA doesn't require a takedown until there's been a complaint. We
really shouldn't allow deletion until there's been an actual complaint. We need technical means for recording official notices and appeals. Informal opinions of ill-informed volunteers aren't helpful.
OTRS? This seems like a social (or potentially a legal) issue not a technical one.
- Fast scripting and insufficient notice lead to flapping of images,
and confusion by the owners of the documents (and the editors of articles, as 2 days is much *much* too short for most of us). We need something to enforce review times.
Again a social issue
- Folks in other industries aren't monitoring Talk pages and have no
idea or sufficient notice that their photos are being deleted. The Talk mechanism is really not a good method for anybody other than very active wikipedians. We need better email and other social notices.
Enable enotif for talk page messages by default?
- We really don't have a method to "prove" that a username is actually
under control of the public figure. Hard to do. Needs discussion.
Again a social issue. No amount of technical magic will be able to solve that issue.
- We probably could use some kind of comparison utility to help
confirm/deny a photo or article is derived from another source.
That could certainly be a technical challenge, and not a trivial one. However at the end of the day we can just get a human to compare.
If there's a better place to discuss this, please indicate.
Commons-l or the VP at commons since these are mostly complaints against the social practises, not technical issues.
-bawolff
On 11/12/11 12:14 PM, bawolff wrote:
Message: 9 Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 09:11:08 -0500 From: William Allen Simpsonwilliam.allen.simpson@gmail.com Subject: [Wikitech-l] Overzealous Commons deletionists To: Wikimedia developerswikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org, info@wikimedia.org Message-ID:4EBE7E7C.8070708@gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
I've noticed a problem with overzealous deletionists on Commons. While this may be something of a legal and political issue, it's also operational and affects multiple *[m,p]edias at the same time.
[snip]
There are a number of obvious technical issues. YouTube and others have had to handle this, it's time for us.
- DMCA doesn't require a takedown until there's been a complaint. We
really shouldn't allow deletion until there's been an actual complaint. We need technical means for recording official notices and appeals. Informal opinions of ill-informed volunteers aren't helpful.
OTRS? This seems like a social (or potentially a legal) issue not a technical one.
Perhaps you could be more explicit. How does the unmentioned, unreferenced, and barely documented OTRS handle the technical process of recording formal complaints and appeals, and managing their handling?
Especially as OTRS specifically states it's for granting permission, not requesting deletion.
What "social" process does that? The "social" process we have now for deletion isn't working.
I'm thinking more like bugzilla.
- Fast scripting and insufficient notice lead to flapping of images,
and confusion by the owners of the documents (and the editors of articles, as 2 days is much *much* too short for most of us). We need something to enforce review times.
Again a social issue
You plan some kind of social monitoring?
What extra volunteer (and boring) time are you offering, personally?
Sure, somebody could constantly monitor recent updates, and try to notice that some administrator is scripting and block them. But in my experience, the recent updates list scrolls by too fast to notice that each deletion request (or deletion) is happening at a rate that makes no sense. It's still only a few per minute, lost in the noise.
Why not use technical means instead?
- Folks in other industries aren't monitoring Talk pages and have no
idea or sufficient notice that their photos are being deleted. The Talk mechanism is really not a good method for anybody other than very active wikipedians. We need better email and other social notices.
Enable enotif for talk page messages by default?
Perhaps. But a weekly bundle won't be fast enough, and a single message that doesn't repeat again until after the user has checked the Talk for previous messages won't handle urgency or repeats. So we'd have to add a special flag for deletion notices.
- We really don't have a method to "prove" that a username is actually
under control of the public figure. Hard to do. Needs discussion.
Again a social issue. No amount of technical magic will be able to solve that issue.
We think of such technical solutions all the time in cryptology. But none as simple and easy as sending SMS asking to call the Foundation Designated Agent....
Reminder, in this case the administrator doesn't believe that the hot lead guitarist for Cee Lo Green would create a user page and upload her own picture. And I'd asked her to create her own page and upload her own picture *because* it would be better than me doing it. It fits the "I, the copyright holder of this work, ..."
He compared her to Madonna. Basically, nothing will convince this administrator. The administrator has to be taken out of the loop.
We need technical means to handle that message.
- We probably could use some kind of comparison utility to help
confirm/deny a photo or article is derived from another source.
That could certainly be a technical challenge, and not a trivial one. However at the end of the day we can just get a human to compare.
Wow, you really have a lot of extra time on your hands....
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:07 AM, William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
Why not use technical means instead?
Why don't you propose a more detailed spec on MediaWiki.org, or better yet, write some code :-)
Erik
"go away and code" seems dismissive ... particularly if there is no interest in installing the code. In economic terms, this is a coordination problem (which are the only interesting economic problems left). The WMF isn't going to commit to installing the code without seeing it first, and yet WAS has no interest in writing code which won't be used (why would he?).
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 2:22 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:07 AM, William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
Why not use technical means instead?
Why don't you propose a more detailed spec on MediaWiki.org, or better yet, write some code :-)
Erik
Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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On 11/12/11 2:22 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 11:07 AM, William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
Why not use technical means instead?
Why don't you propose a more detailed spec on MediaWiki.org, or better yet, write some code :-)
I'm sure you're trying to be helpful, but last time I wrote some code here, it wasn't well received. I'd defined it to be language independent, so that future C parser replacements would be easier. But it was re-written to depend on PHP date string formats.
Ugh. (Yes, I was thinking ahead back in 2006. Still waiting for those promised fast C parsers.)
And, I found a bug that was clearly having problems during parsing time functions in large pages with many templates, demonstrated it at en.wiki CFD (where I also designed the templates), wrote simple code -- yet it was closed "works for me".
<sarcasm>Yeah, I reported the bug and wrote the code for my health. </sarcasm>
So, I prefer to get consensus on strategy *before* writing code. And probably prefer letting the semi-pro PHP code writers do it, so they don't feel passed over by mere amateurs.
Also, wiki discussions are a waste of time. They are hard to read, and aren't threaded by MUAs that folks have spent a decade polishing.
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 8:07 PM, William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
He compared her to Madonna. Basically, nothing will convince this administrator. The administrator has to be taken out of the loop.
We need technical means to handle that message.
No you don't. Clearly noticing such activity isn't a problem because you noticed and you're complaining about it. If you notice an administrator doing things you believe to be wrong or in violation of the rules or whatever, you complain to them, and if they don't listen, you complain on the village pump or the admins noticeboard or whichever on-wiki discussion forum takes your fancy, and then the community as a whole can discuss it. They might decide to discipline the admin, they might decide you're full of it, or they might decide nothing at all (no consensus). But this is a social problem, by no means a technical one.
Roan
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 2:24 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.comwrote:
But this is a social problem, by no means a technical one.
I'm not sure I understand what your "this" refers to, but "how to inform infrequent Wikipedia editors that their contribution is going to be deleted unless you take action" is a technical problem.
Deletionism is the social problem, yes.
Much of the problem is simply a lack of tools to handle the process in a timly manner, that also assure that something will happen and that is sufficient to stop any legal actions.
Why not add a magic word for __NODOWNLOADLINK__ so a template about deleting an image due to copyright will sort of protect it agains reuse. That way the community has taken prompt action to protect the authors interest, and started the process of figuring out the rationale behind any claim. I'm not sure but I think the necessary response time then will be weeks and not days.
If it was some kind of log when specific magic words, categories or templates were added to or removed from a page, and it were possile to filter this log on time, then only overdue entries would show up. Such a log would probably represent a pretty small load to the system and it could even be managed from a worker process so it won't hinder the normal rendering of the page after edit.
This would create the necessary tools to assure that there is a process to handle copyright infringements, even if the process would run over weeks or months.
Add a magic word to enforce "enotif" on specific templates and the whole process shold be a lot more easy to handle than today.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Roan Kattouw" roan.kattouw@gmail.com
On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 8:07 PM, William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
He compared her to Madonna. Basically, nothing will convince this administrator. The administrator has to be taken out of the loop.
We need technical means to handle that message.
No you don't. Clearly noticing such activity isn't a problem because you noticed and you're complaining about it. If you notice an administrator doing things you believe to be wrong or in violation of the rules or whatever, you complain to them, and if they don't listen, you complain on the village pump or the admins noticeboard or whichever on-wiki discussion forum takes your fancy, and then the community as a whole can discuss it. They might decide to discipline the admin, they might decide you're full of it, or they might decide nothing at all (no consensus). But this is a social problem, by no means a technical one.
I disagree, Roan, that the solution here is *completely* social; "you noticed it, didn't you" doesn't scale.
Cheers, -- jra
On 12/11/11 20:07, William Allen Simpson wrote:
On 11/12/11 12:14 PM, bawolff wrote:
There are a number of obvious technical issues. YouTube and others have had to handle this, it's time for us.
- DMCA doesn't require a takedown until there's been a complaint. We
really shouldn't allow deletion until there's been an actual complaint. We need technical means for recording official notices and appeals. Informal opinions of ill-informed volunteers aren't helpful.
OTRS? This seems like a social (or potentially a legal) issue not a technical one.
Perhaps you could be more explicit. How does the unmentioned, unreferenced, and barely documented OTRS handle the technical process of recording formal complaints and appeals, and managing their handling?
Especially as OTRS specifically states it's for granting permission, not requesting deletion.
It's also used for "communicating with <project>". Not only for granting permissions.
What "social" process does that? The "social" process we have now for deletion isn't working.
I'm thinking more like bugzilla.
It is indeed a bit like bugzilla. Each email creates a ticket, which can be tracked.
- Fast scripting and insufficient notice lead to flapping of images,
and confusion by the owners of the documents (and the editors of articles, as 2 days is much *much* too short for most of us). We need something to enforce review times.
Again a social issue
You plan some kind of social monitoring?
What extra volunteer (and boring) time are you offering, personally?
Sure, somebody could constantly monitor recent updates, and try to notice that some administrator is scripting and block them. But in my experience, the recent updates list scrolls by too fast to notice that each deletion request (or deletion) is happening at a rate that makes no sense. It's still only a few per minute, lost in the noise.
Why not use technical means instead?
You mean that if Foo uploaded some child porn to commons, the software would block a direct deletion and instead force a deletion request and 7 days waiting before allowing it to be removed?
You are rejecting that it is a social problem
- Folks in other industries aren't monitoring Talk pages and have no
idea or sufficient notice that their photos are being deleted. The Talk mechanism is really not a good method for anybody other than very active wikipedians. We need better email and other social notices.
Enable enotif for talk page messages by default?
It is already enabled.
Perhaps. But a weekly bundle won't be fast enough,
It isn't a weekly bundle.
and a single message that doesn't repeat again until after the user has checked the Talk for previous messages won't handle urgency or repeats. So we'd have to add a special flag for deletion notices.
Would that 'flag' make a difference? If I'm away from a computer, it doesn't matter if I receive 1 or 20 emails about getting a message in my talk. I will look at it when I arrive. OTOH, there are valid concerns about it, such as people reading the differences from an unlogged device, or problems if they slipped that message (resend on new talk messages after X days?).
- We really don't have a method to "prove" that a username is actually
under control of the public figure. Hard to do. Needs discussion.
Again a social issue. No amount of technical magic will be able to solve that issue.
We think of such technical solutions all the time in cryptology. But none as simple and easy as sending SMS asking to call the Foundation Designated Agent....
Reminder, in this case the administrator doesn't believe that the hot lead guitarist for Cee Lo Green would create a user page and upload her own picture. And I'd asked her to create her own page and upload her own picture *because* it would be better than me doing it. It fits the "I, the copyright holder of this work, ..."
He compared her to Madonna. Basically, nothing will convince this administrator. The administrator has to be taken out of the loop.
We need technical means to handle that message.
If OTRS say it's her, that should be enough. Of course, she could also send a SMS to the Chief Community Officer if she prefers to. But does he know which is the right mobile number of the artist?
- We probably could use some kind of comparison utility to help
confirm/deny a photo or article is derived from another source.
That could certainly be a technical challenge, and not a trivial one. However at the end of the day we can just get a human to compare.
Wow, you really have a lot of extra time on your hands....
If a person needs to find out the two photos, in order to ask the software if they are one derived from the other. Yes, it's better to let the human make the decission. If you mean, find any photo similar to this, there is such software (eg. Google Images) and it is used by commons users.
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