[Foundation-l] A Board member's perspective

[Adam Cuerden]

Stu wrote: '"Due to the failure of the community process, something
extraordinary had to be done"



There's been many statements claiming that Commons cannot police
itself, however, the deletions have been counted: a mere 400 files
were deleted, after which Jimbo said the cleanup was done. A lot of
those are getting undeleted, because it's agreed they never should've
been deleted in the first place.  There are 6,609,202 files on
commons. That means that less than one hundredth of one percent of all
files were of a type that could be considered pornographic by Jimbo's
definitions, and that's such an extremely low number that it would
imply Commons was doing a pretty good job of monitoring itself.

Further, Jimbo only proposed the new policy May 6th.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3ASexual_content&action=historysubmit&diff=38830945&oldid=38801972

By May 7th, 89 edits had been made, and a workable policy was
beginning to emerge:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons%3ASexual_content&action=historysubmit&diff=38893880&oldid=38830959

While there were doubts on the talk page about the record keeping act,
provisional to the Foundation making a statement, most people were
willing to wait and accept Jimbo's judgement - and he was pushing very
hard for it.     It had very quickly become clear that art was
considered a protected case, but Commons was more than willing to look
into photographs and film, and deal with the legal issues that were
implied to be the reason for the policy change.

The process was working - and then Jimbo went on a rampage, deleting
art and diagrams, and wheel-warring. to keep art deleted.

This was NOT about Commons refusing to cooperate. This was Jimbo
seeking approval of a pre-defined action, which he misled the
community into thinking was for legal reasons, then when consensus
went the slightest bit differently to what he wanted, protecting
artworks and such, he went ahead and deleting art and diagrams anyway.

And for what? Is "We've deleted the pornographic photographs" really
so much worse PR than "We've deleted pornographic photographs, and
also artworks widely agreed to have strong artistic merit by art
scholars?"

I'd have said the latter was the far worse choice.


[Addendum: Right, let's see if this threading works]