[Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork

[Nikola Smolenski]

On Sat, 2011-10-22 at 23:35 +0200, Tobias Oelgarte wrote:
> Am 22.10.2011 23:23, schrieb Nikola Smolenski:
> > On Sat, 2011-10-22 at 21:16 +0100, David Gerard wrote:
> >> "Both the opinion poll itself and its proposal were accepted. In
> >> contrary to the decision of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia
> >> Foundation, personal image filters should not be introduced in
> >> German-speaking wikipedia and categories for these filters may not be
> >> created for files locally stored on this wikipedia. 260 of 306 users
> >> (84.97 percent) accepted the poll as to be formally valid. 357 of 414
> >> users (86.23 percent) do not agree to the introduction of a personal
> >> image filter and categories for filtering in German wikipedia."
> > I wanted to say this for a long time, and now seems like a good
> > opportunity. I see this as a tyranny of the majority. I understand that
> > a large majority of German Wikipedia editors are against the filter. But
> > even if 99.99% of editors are against the filter, well, it is opt-in and
> > they don't have to use it. But why would they prevent me from using it,
> > if I want to use it?
> >
> Why? Because it is against the basic rules of the project. It is
> intended to discriminate content. To judge about it and to represent you

No, it is intended to let people discriminate content themselves if they
want, which is a huge difference.
 
> this judgment before you have even looked at it. Additionally it can be 

If I feel that this judgment is inadequate, I will turn the filter off.
Either way, it is My Problem. Not Your Problem.

> easily exploited by your local provider to hide labeled content, so that 
> you don't have any way to view it, even if you want to.

Depending on the way it is implemented, it may be somewhat difficult for
a provider to do that. Such systems probably already exist on some
websites, and I am not aware of my provider using them to hide labelled
content. And even if my provider would start doing that, I could simply
use Wikipedia over https.

And if providers across the world start abusing the filter, perhaps then
the filter could be turned off. I just don't see this as a reasonable
possibility.

> If you want a filter so badly, then install parental software, close 

It is my understanding that parental software is often too overarching
or otherwise inadequate.

> your eyes or don't visit the page. That is up to you. That is your

If I close my eyes or don't visit the page, I won't be able to read the
content of the page.

> PS: If it wasn't at this place i would call your contribution trolling.

It certainly isn't very helpful to good discussion that now I know you
would call it trolling were we discussing it somewhere else.

> But feel free to read the arguments: 
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meinungsbilder/Einf%C3%BChrung_pers%C3%B6nlicher_Bildfilter/en#Arguments_for_the_proposal

It seems to me that the arguments are mostly about a filter that would
be turned on by default. Most of them seem to evaporate when applied to
an opt-in filter.