[Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

[Mike Godwin]

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> > Obviously, this notion is too cute to actually be helpful, but I thought
> I'd
> > share it.
>
> It has an enormously cute strawman answer:  If you don't want to see
> images which aren't used inline in another wiki, don't look at commons
> at all!   By definition any image in use in a Wikipedia is available
> outside of commons. :)
>

Right. The difference is that instead of simply telling people not to go to
Commons, you could say "go to Commons, but if you only want to see images
that have been deemed to be worth including in an article, click here."

Back in the old days, we used to call this "user empowerment" (I actually
coined the term in mid-1990s for EFF).



> Don't forget that a major reason that people look at commons is
> because Wikipedia articles will usually only have a few illustrations,
> for editorial/flow reasons.  If you're mostly interested in visual
> details about the subject of your interest you'll follow the commons
> link from the Wikipedia article.   ... but in that case your suggested
> image hiding wouldn't be helpful.
>

It might be helpful for people who are worried about seeing images that have
merely been dumped in Commons.  Presumably those who want to see all the
images could click the appropriate option and see all unlinked images as
well.

Remember that the goal here (not my personal goal, but the goal of some) is
less for a "perfect solution" than for a way of avoiding superfluous dumped
images that don't have educational value.  My suggestion is inelegant (there
are no elegant solutions), but also content-neutral (the umpteenth unlinked
image of Lincoln or Gandhi would be blocked too).  That way, the only
offensive images we'd have to defend would be the ones that the community
deemed appropriate to include in an article (a category of images that I
personally am generally willing to defend, regardless of the type of
content).


--Mike