[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

Sydney Poore sydney.poore at gmail.com
Wed Sep 7 12:11:21 UTC 2011


On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Yann Forget <yannfo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/9/7 Sydney Poore <sydney.poore at gmail.com>:
> >
> > The way that WMF collects and uses images is one of the biggest
> differences
> > between us and other organizations that have a similar mission.
> Libraries,
> > museums, universities, publishers of reference works, and other
> > educationally minded organizations do not solicit for amateur images for
> > their collections.  Lack of peer review of our images prior to
> acquisition
> > is at the heart of the problem and is large part of what is causing the
> > disconnect between the people who do not approve of our "controversial
> > content" and our editors who upload the images.
>
> Well, other "educationally minded organizations" do not either solicit
> amateurs for writing encyclopedic articles.
> But we do peer review images after they have been uploaded on Commons
> or Wikipedia.
>
> It seems that, 10 years after Wikipedia and its sisters have been
> created, you still do not understand that there are wikis.
>
> > Sydney
>
> Regards,
>
> Yann
>

Hi Yann,

You are someone that does deletions on Commons of images that are out of
scope. I very much appreciate your work as it helps keep some of the worst
images out of Commons.

But in my view, this is not the same type of peer review that is used when
creating content on Wikipedia. In general, we expect the content to come
from an existing body of work that has already under gone a vigorous form of
review by people who are trained to know if the content is high quality or
not.

I upload original images to Commons, too. :-)

I'm not suggesting that we abandon this system now. But we need to recognize
the way that the abundance of low quality images is limiting our ability to
create high quality works.

In practice, some Wikipedias also have a problem with peer reviewing
content, too. Suppression of unsourced content is needed because some wikis
don't have a way to prevent the addition of very inappropriate material.

IMO, reminding ourselves of the problems with the way that wikis work is
essential to finding ways to improve.

Sydney
User:FloNight


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