[Foundation-l] Racism in Commons

[George Herbert]

On Dec 5, 2007 12:12 PM, Bryan Tong Minh <bryan.tongminh at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Dec 5, 2007 9:03 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Dec 5, 2007 11:56 AM, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > Exemplar images of anything is educational: the many aspects of sex,
> > > violence, racism, propaganda, racism, hate, &c.
> > >
> >
> > ...and we host exemplars of everything (short of child porn, I hope).
> >
> > That we properly host exemplars in a category does not mean that we
> should
> > host further examples which are not being used in educational articles
> on
> > any of the projects.
> >
> This implies that the Commons community prescribes what images other
> projects should use. I think this is wrong: we should give projects
> themselves the opportunity to choose whatever image they prefer.


I don't think that implies that at all.

1. Another project can always locally host an image, if Commons won't have
it.
2. An image on Commons *not* used on any project is... wrong.  Regardless of
whether it's controversial or not.

I don't mind there being free image repositories.  It would not be a bad
thing if the WMF formed one as a new project.  Commons, as it stands now, is
specifically more focused on supporting the other projects.

If the particular images this is all about had been used as exemplars of
racist images somewhere on an article or in a wikibook or whatever, I'd
recommend having kept them regardless of how offensive they are.  But they
weren't.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com