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

[Neil Harris]

On 23/10/11 16:24, Andrew Garrett wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 8:27 AM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> A neutral all-or-nothing image filter would not have such side effects
>> (and would also neatly help low bandwidth usage).
> It would also make the project useless. I don't want to see the 0.01%
> (yes, rhetorical statistics again) images of medical procedures, and
> I'd avoid seeing the (much higher) X% of images that are NSFW while in
> public. That does not mean that I want to throw the baby out with the
> bathwater and not see any images whatsoever.
>
> Given the choice, I would not use such a filter.
>
> We have the technology and the capacity to allow users to make nuanced
> decisions about what they do and don't want to see. Why is this a
> problem?
>

I think this has been dealt with before.

Firstly, images should only be in articles to which they are directly 
relevant -- we should be able to rely on the community to remove images 
which are irrelevant to articles. This is no more, but also no less, 
reasonable an expectation than to expect them to keep images correctly 
categorized in sufficient detail to allow your personal preferences to 
be catered for.

Secondly, the title and context alone is usually enough to suggest what 
topic an article is about.

Just to give an example: I'm pretty convinced that if I click on, say, 
the article for [[Stoke Poges]], that I will not be presented with an 
image that offends my personal sensibilities. Likewise with [[Calcium]] 
or [[Astrolabe]]. On the other hand, if I were offended by medical 
images, I might think twice about viewing [[Splenectomy]] or 
[[Autopsy]]. (Note that all of these examples are sight-unseen -- if I'm 
wrong about any of this, and, say, [[Calcium]] contains an unpleasant 
image, please let me know.)

Given that, if you are concerned about distressing medical images, it 
seems obvious to me that you can get almost 100% effectiveness at 
preventing this by just turnin on the global image filter before 
browsing Wikipedia on medical topics. If you believe the pictures are 
safe to view, based on the image captions, one click turns them back on 
again.

The same applies to browsing Wikipedia for articles that might contain 
images that might offend your religious sensibilities, or non-work-safe 
images.

If you're not sure about the topic of an article (what's an 
[[Ursprache]]? Could it be some kind of nasty-looking injury?), you can 
play safe and turn the filter on, and be absolutely 100% sure of not 
being offended, or leave it off and still be _almost_ sure of not being 
offended because most articles do not contain images that offend anyone.

The rest of the time, just leave it turned off -- which is also one click.

Where would the difficulty be in that?

- Neil