[Foundation-l] Board resolutions on controversial content and images of identifiable people

[David Goodman]

Phebe, I ask you once more, how do you go from the   statement that
filtering should be available to those who want to use it, to the
statement that W<F should provide filtering?  It's like going from the
statement  that people should be able to use Wikipedia content for
political purposes,  to the statement that the WMF should do so. Or to
make it plainer, that people who find   Wikipedia articles appropriate
for advocating their religious beliefs may use the content for that
purpose, to that the WMF should find some universally acceptable sets
of spiritual beliefs, and use its content to advocate them. Taking one
of the proposed possibilities (probably the one that instigated this),
providing for censoring images on the grounds of sexual content is
doing exactly that for views on  sexual behavior. We're officially
saying that X is content you may find objectionable, but Y isn't.
That's making an editorial statement about what is shown on X and Y.
We can make a descriptive statement, as libraries do, (in this case,
perhaps that X shows  naked human female breasts, and Y shows male
ones) but not an editorial one, that one not the other is likely to be
objectionable.  Anyone is certainly free to make such an assertion,
but not the Foundation.

I want to ask you something else. It's been suggested several times at
various places that the present resolution is justified as a
compromise to prevent a considerably more repressive form of
censorship. I'm not asking  who, though I can guess one or two of them
from their previous public statements, but I think it would be very
enlightening to know those positions. Perhaps  you could, however, say
what those proposals were.  I am not going to put you on the spot by
asking whether if   such a view had been the majority, whether you
would you still have voted for it to preserve unanimity. I am however
going to ask whether the  fact that such proposals were entertained,
shows the validity of the argument that we're on a slippery slope.
Once you admit censorship, it's hard to limit it; once you admit POV
editing, it inevitable develops into arrant promotionalism.
Censorship is inherently POV editing.

David



On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 3:10 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 8:14 AM, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 05:21:23PM +0200, Milos Rancic wrote:
>> > Board was aware of that, as the first Robert Harris' report included
>> > very similar text from Canadian librarian association.
>>
>> I would then like to point out that there is no practical way to
>> make a value-neutral categorisation scheme to use for filtering.
>
>
>
> This seems like an over-hasty statement. There are many possible
> categorization schemes that are neutral; the ALA in fact makes that
> distinction itself, since libraries (obviously) use all kinds of labeling
> and categorization schemes all the time. The ALA and other library
> organizations have taken a stand against censorious and non-neutral
> labeling, not all labeling. If you keep reading the ALA page you linked, it
> says that the kind of labels that are not appropriate are when "the
> prejudicial label is used to warn, discourage or prohibit users or certain
> groups of users from accessing the material" -- e.g. a label that reads "not
> appropriate for children". That does not mean that picture books for kids,
> or mystery novels, or large-print books, aren't labeled as such in every
> public library in the country -- and that is the difference between
> informative and prejudicial labeling.
>
> The ALA also makes a point of stating that materials should be on open
> shelves and accessible to everyone regardless of labeling -- this comes out
> of, among other things, the once-common practice of not allowing children in
> the adult section of the library. The natural equivalent for us I think is
> to make sure that all materials we host are accessible to everyone
> regardless of any label, which is certainly a principle we have and continue
> to uphold.
>
> The Board didn't specify any particular mechanism or system in our
> resolution. What we did was to ask for a particular kind of feature and
> spell out some principles for its development. We talked about neutral
> language in the interface, and our intent was exactly that distinction I
> noted between informative and prejudicial -- we do not wish to set up a
> system that privileges certain value judgments about content. We wish
> *readers to have a choice* when they use our projects -- one they do not
> have now unless they are remarkably technically inclined and
> forward-looking.
>
> We didn't address the categorization system in particular because frankly,
> it's not our business. It's the community's, and tech's. And the Trustees
> didn't all agree on whether we thought categorization as proposed in the
> first draft of the system was the best idea, anyway; some of us thought it
> was appropriately in line with the principle of least astonishment, and some
> of us thought it could lead to problems. But we did come to consensus on the
> high-level idea as expressed in the resolution, and we agreed and understood
> that the ideas around how to implement it would have to iterate, with
> reevaluation along the way. But after all, developing informative, neutral
> and useful systems for organizing information is something that the
> Wikimedia projects have become world-famous for -- so if anyone can do it I
> have faith that we can :)
>
> As I told DGG, there's a lot of caveats in that resolution. And those
> caveats are there for a reason. It should not be extrapolated that the Board
> as a whole *actually* supports a particular, or different, or more
> censorious, filtering scheme. What we want is for people to easily be able
> to hide images for themselves if they don't want to see them when using our
> projects. (And we also want other things, like better tools for Commons,
> that are expressed in other parts of that resolution.)
>
> I know we are all looking forward to seeing the referendum results, and the
> data from it will need to be carefully considered. In the meantime I am glad
> to see more discussion of this, but I am remembering that it is a stressful
> topic!
>
> best,
> -- phoebe
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-- 
David Goodman

DGG at the enWP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG