[Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 6:42 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Fae <fae at wikimedia.org.uk>
>> We could also just delete them, unless someone actually uses them in a sensible way in an article. :-)
>>
>> sincerely,
>>        Kim Bruning
>
> Not on Commons; being "objectionable" to some viewers and not being
> currently in use does not make a potentially educational image out of
> scope. I have seen many poorly worded deletion requests on Commons on
> the basis of a potentially useable image being "orphaned" rather than
> it being unrealistic to expect it to ever be used for an educational
> purpose.
>
> Fae
>
>
>
>
> Agree with Fae; Commons is a general image repository in its own right, serving a bigger audience than just the other Wikimedia projects.
>
> So the fact is that Commons will contain controversial images – and that we have to curate them responsibly.
>
> Someone on Meta has pointed out that Commons seems to list sexual image results for search terms like cucumber, electric toothbrushes or pearl necklace way higher than a corresponding Google search. See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/commons-l/2011-October/006290.html
>

Concur strenously. Jimbo tried deleting things he thought would have no useful
purpose but merely titillation from commons and crashed and burned. Not the
way to go folks! The finnish wikipedia uses a victorian or
pre-victorian era mildly
pedophilic suggestive copperplate drawing as an illustration of the "Pedophilia"
article. By modern day standards the image is more comical than titillating
*by our Finnish standards* --- but would be highly suspect in the US, atleast
if the deletion debate for that image at commons is to be given credence to...



-- 
--
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]]