[Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Sydney Poore]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:48 AM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:

> I want to write personally -- not speaking on behalf of the Foundation but
> instead as a longtime participant in online communities who has worked
> extensively on free-speech issues -- to offer my perspective on a couple of
> themes that I've seen made in threads here. The first is the claim that
> Jimmy's actions represent a collapse in the face of a threat by Fox News
> (and that this threat was somehow small or insignificant). The second is
> the
> idea that the proper focus of the current discussion ought to be focused on
> Jimmy (and anger against Jimmy's taking action, or against particular
> aspects of the actions he took) to the effective exclusion of discussion of
> whether Wikimedia Commons policy should be revisited, refined, or better
> implemented.
>
> First, my belief as a former journalist is that Fox News is not a
> responsible news organization. This means that they get too many stories
> wrong in the first place (as when they uncritically echo Larry Sanger's
> uninformed and self-interested assertions), and it also means that when
> their mistakes are brought to their attention, they may redouble their
> aggressive attacks in the hope of somehow vindicating their original story.
> This I believe is what Fox News (or at least its reporter and her editors)
> were trying to do. If the media culture in the United States were such that
> Fox News had no influence outside itself, we could probably just ignore it.
> But the reality is that the virulent culture of Fox News does manage to
> infect other media coverage in ways that are destructive to good people and
> to good projects.
>
> I disagree with the suggestion that it would have been better for Fox to
> have gone with the original story they were trying to create rather than
> with the story Jimmy in effect created for them.  Jimmy's decision to
> intervene changed the narrative they were attempting to create. So even if
> you disagree with some or all of the particulars of Jimmy's actions, you
> may
> still be able to see how Jimmy's actions, taken as a whole, created
> breathing space for discussion of an issue on Commons that even many of
> Jimmy's critics believe is a real issue.
>
> The question then becomes whether we're doing to discuss the issues of
> Commons policy or discuss whether Jimmy's actions themselves signify a
> problem that needs to be fixed.  You may say we can discuss both, and
> technically you'd be right, but the reality of human discourse is that if
> you spend your time venting at Jimmy, you won't be discussing Commons
> policy, and you'll be diverting attention from Commons policy. My personal
> opinion is that this would be the waste of an opportunity.
>
> I think it's also worth remembering that when an individual like Jimmy is
> given extraordinary cross-project powers to use in extraordinary
> circumstances, this more or less guarantees that any use of those powers
> will be controversial. (If they were uncontroversial, nobody would need
> them, since consensus processes would fix all problems quickly and
> effectively.) But rather than focus on whether your disagreement with the
> particulars of what Jimmy did means that Jimmy's powers should be removed,
> you should choose instead, I believe, to use this abrupt intervention as an
> opportunity to discuss whether Commons policy and its implementation can be
> improved in a way that brings it more into line with the Wikimedia
> projects'
> mission. Once this discussion happens, it would not surprise me if the
> result turned out to be that some of the material deleted by Jimmy will be
> restored by the community -- probably with Jimmy's approval in many cases.
>
> To the extent that Jimmy's intervention has triggered a healthy debate
> about
> policy, I think the powers he used, and the decisions -- not individually
> but taken as a whole -- that he made are justified. (Like many of you, I
> would probably disagree with some of his particular decisions, but I
> recognize that I'd be critical of anyone's particular decisions.) It is not
> the case, after all, that Jimmy routinely intervenes in projects these days
> -- it is mostly the case that he forbears from intervening, which is as it
> should be, and which I think speaks well of his restraint.  It should be
> kept in mind, I think, that Jimmy's intervention was aimed at protecting
> our
> projects from external threat and coercion, precisely to give breathing
> space to the kind of dialog and consensus processes that we all value and
> believe to be core principles of Wikimedia projects. I hope that rather
> than
> venting and raging about what was done in the face of an imminent and
> vicious threat gives way to some forward-looking discussion of how things
> can be made better. This discussion is best focused on policy, and not on
> Jimmy, in my view, since Jimmy's actions represent efforts to protect the
> Wikimedia projects and movement. That's where our efforts should be focused
> too.
>
>
>
> --Mike
>

I fully endorse every aspect of Mike Godwin's comment.

The Boards statement makes it clear that their view is that Community
discussion is needed to find long term solutions to the issue. And that "not
censored" should not be used to halt discussions about the way to manage
content.

The clean up project initiated by Jimmy on Commons has brought much needed
attention to a long standing problem. Now is the time for the Community to
focus on cleaning up Commons and writing a sensible policy about managing
sexual content.

Sydney Poore
(FloNight)