[Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia

[David Goodman]

In our sphere, we librarians also decided this issue some time ago:
Labeling is censorship. Those who wish to censor have their own
purposes, and have the ability to devise their own methods. We have
metadata on our objects, both titles and categories. We have the
responsibility to provide information about our images as well as the
images, for educational value--and usefulness generally-- depends on
context .

Some people in the world think, rightly or not, that there is a need
to censor certain kinds of material for at least certain audiences.
What we already have should provide sufficient information for any
ordinary need for censorship, formal or informal.  More sophisticated
systems can use image analysis.

I myself think there is in fact no genuine need for censorship of any
sort. But we would be wrong to adopt technical measures either to
prevent the censoring of our material, or to promote it. WP has, as it
ought to have,  a free license that deliberately permits people to
fork or modify or select from it. Our purpose is to provide free
material in every sense of the word, and this freedom includes the
ability to make good or bad use of it and we do not judge that. We
differ in this respect from many other good sites, many of which are
free except that they  prohibit commercial use; we have always
maintained our lack of distinction between subsequent uses as a basic
principle, and should continue to maintain it.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG



On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:04 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> Derk-Jan Hartman wrote:
>> This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach
>> ---
>>
>>
>
>
> You asked for comments... Here is one we prepared earlier...
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_censorship#ICRA
>
> In other words, we have been here, we have done this, and we
> have the T-shirt.
>
> This *HAS* been suggested before, and soundly defeated.
> Nothing has changed in this respect. I would heartfeltly ask
> that folks just quit trying to stuff this down the throat of a
> community that simply does not content labeling.
>
>
> Yours,
>
> Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
>
>
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