[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[Milos Rancic]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:35, Sydney Poore <sydney.poore at gmail.com> wrote:
> Seeking outside opinions, and outreach efforts to bring more people into our
> Communities are high on my list of priorities because WMF contributor base
> is too homogeneous for me to be comfortable that our community members are
> making neutral decisions.

Agreed. So, how can we do that? On ad hoc basis and by lying the
community that it's about referendum or a bit more organized?

> 1) We have people speaking up publicly saying that they are not able to edit
> from some locations because of the presence of some images on our Projects.
> Numerous editors have told me this in private, too. 2) We regularly have
> people put up "controversial content"  for deletion because they find it
> offensive or out of scope. 3) Image filters are commonly available on other
> internet website, often by default.

That doesn't give a picture of how deep that problem is. Without
harder evidences, I could freely conclude that it's just about
particular portion of US society which is anyway positioned far from
our ideals, so not worthy of efforts. (Similarly to that, I have no
intention to work ma making Wikipedia closer to Serbian morons of any
kind. The necessary prerequisite for using internet and Wikipedia is
not to be a moron.)

> The idea of offering imagine filters on WMF project is much more
> controversial than it is on other internet websites. So, I I think that it
> is fair to suggest that we examine why we are having conflicts over this
> topic when other website don't. One possible reason is that our base of
> editors is different from other websites. If that is true, then I think we
> need to allow for this difference when we make features to appeal to
> readers.

I don't see that as a problem and something unusual. We are community
driven and we don't depend on Rupert Murdoch et al., unlike any other
commercial sites.