[Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal filter lists

[Tobias Oelgarte]

Am 29.11.2011 12:09, schrieb Andre Engels:
> On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 11:37 AM, Tobias Oelgarte
> <tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>
>> If the filter is predefined then it might meet the personal preference
>> and can be easy to use. But it will be an violation of NPOV, since
>> someone else (a group of reader/users) would have to define it. That
>> isn't user initiated censorship anymore.
> It is still the user who chooses whether or not to remove images, and
> if so, which list, although of course their choice is restricted. I
> guess that's not user initiated, but it is still user chosen.
With the tiny (actually big) problem that such lists are public and can 
be directly feed into the filters of not so people loving or extremely 
caring ISP's. This removes the freedom of choice from the users. Not 
from those that want this feature, but from those that don't want or 
that don't want it every time. In this case you trade a convenience for 
some of our readers against the ability to access all the knowledge that 
we could provide.
>> The comparison with AdBlock sucks, because you didn't looked at the goal
>> of both tools. AdBlock and it's predefined lists are trying to hide
>> _any_ advertisement, while the filter is meant to _only_ hide
>> controversial content. This comes down to the two extrema noted above,
>> that are the only two neutral options.
> I don't agree. We are not deciding which content is controversial and
> which not, we are giving users the option to decide not to see
> such-and-such content if they don't want to. That's not necessarily
> labeling them as controversial; it is even less labeling other content
> as non-controversial.
I neither agree. We decide what belongs to which preset (or who will do 
it?), and it is meant to filter out controversial content. Therefore we 
define what controversial content is, - or at least we tell the people, 
what we think, that might be controversial, while we also tell them 
(exclusion method) that other things aren't controversial.
> Even more importantly, your options are not neutral at all, in my
> opinion. "Either everything is controversial or nothing is". That's
> not a neutral statement. "It's controversial to you if you consider it
> controversial to you" - that's much closer to being NPOV, and that's
> what the proposal is trying to do.
No. This options are meant to say that "you have to define for yourself 
what is controversial". They take the extreme stances of equal judgment. 
Either anything is guilty or nothing is guilty and both stances provide 
no information at all. Both give no definition. It is not the answer to 
the question: "What is controversial?" under the assumption that not 
anything or not everything is controversial. If you agree that not 
anything or not everything is controversial than this simple rule has to 
apply, since both extremes are untrue. That is very simple logic and 
forces you to define it for yourself.

Back to the statement: "It's controversial to you if you consider it 
controversial to you". Thats right. But it's not related to the initial 
problem. In this case you will only find a "you" and a "you". There is 
no "we", "them" or anything like that. You could have written: "If my 
leg hurts, then my leg hurts". Always true, but useless to be applied to 
something that involves anything not done not by you in the first part 
of the sentence.

>   NPOV is not about treating every
> _subject_ as equal, but about treating every _opinion_ as equal.
This is a nice sentence. I hope that you will it. I also hope that you 
remember that images are subjects and not opinions.

>   If I
> have a set of images I consider controversial, and you have a
> different, perhaps non-intersecting set that you consider
> controversial, the NPOV method is to consider both distinctions as
> valid, not to say that it means that everything is controversial, or
> nothing is.
A filter with presets considers only one opinion as valid. It shows an 
image or it does hide it. Stating different opinions inside an article 
is a very different thing. You represent both opinions but you don't 
apply them. On top of that it are the opinions of people that don't 
write the article.

>   And -surprise- that seems to be exactly what this proposal
> is trying to achieve. It is probably not ideal, there might even be
> reasons to drop it completely, but NPOV is much better served by this
> proposal than it is by yours.
>
Actually you misused or misunderstood the core of NPOV in combination 
with this two stances. Thats why i can't agree or follow your conclusion.

NPOV is meant in the way that we don't say what is right or is wrong. We 
represent the opinions and we let the user decide what to do with them. 
Additionally NPOV implies that we don't write down our own opinions. 
Instead we cite them.