[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
In my opinion there are three issues.

   - there is an influx of material that is best kept private
   - there is material that some may object to
   - we can not fulfil our aim because Commons and Wikimedia gets blocked in
   countries like Iran

All the pictures best kept private can be deleted.

The material that some may object to can be evaluated for its educational
and encyclopaedic value and appropriately categorised or deleted.

When we start by addressing the first issue, there are two parts to it. The
material itself and the people uploading it. The first is easy, the second
is a matter of making sure that the message that this kind of material is
not acceptable and should not be imported from Flickr or wherever is
absolutely clear.

Once this process is under way, we can contact countries like Iran and
inform them of the measures that have been taken. It is likely that once
this process is well under way, the total block of the Wikimedia domain will
be lifted including Commons. This may need action from the WMF and the Farsi
community to approach this in the best way.

The second issue is more problematic. What one person categorises as nudity,
someone else will considered dressed. What one culture considers obscene and
puts a fig leave on is considered a classic master piece by later cultures.
There will be no easy consensus on this except for the cultural value that
many of these objects have. The David of Michelangelo is a nude..

The third issue is one that takes careful handling. It is also something
where we have to be careful to set our own agenda and not let creeps like
Fox have us rush in needless infighting. Our objective is clear and, it is
important to note that it is not Wikipedia that has been blocked in Iran.
For this reason it is important not to approach this with knee jerk
reactions making "them" look bad and "us" look good. We do not serve the
government of Iran, we serve the students of Iran and the people looking for
information.
Thanks,
       GerardM

On 8 May 2010 11:50, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:

> On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:58:10PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote:
> > Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem "important" to
> > the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit
> > POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar.  The filters can then scale with
> > us.
>
> Shall we also make similar proposals favoring the governments of China and
> Iran re
> political or religeous content?
>
> sincerely,
>        Kim Bruning
>
>
>
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