[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[phoebe ayers]

On Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:53 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 September 2011 17:22, Kim Bruning <kim at bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 09:38:38AM -0700, Sue Gardner wrote:
>
>>> I wrote the questions, with Phoebe and SJ, in Boston at the Wikipedia
>>> in Higher Ed conference.
>>> It's not a secret -- I wrote about it here:
>>> http://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AImage_filter_referendum%2FResults%2Fen&action=historysubmit&diff=2880100&oldid=2880046
>
>> Awesome. That puts so much into perspective :-)
>> Thank you for answering that question, Sue!
>
>
> Yes, thank you :-)
>
> I note SJ's comment on the lack of a "do you want this?" question:
>
> "I too wish that the separate question had been asked. –SJ talk |
> translate   20:54, 5 September 2011 (UTC)"
>
> SJ, what can now be done to ask this - vital and missing - question?
>
>
> - d.

David -- and all --

I've been away for a week offline, so am trying to catch up. I'm
picking a random point in the thread to try and answer lots of
questions at once, from my own viewpoint.

Re: the problems with the referendum -- it's my understanding that the
committee in charge of running the referendum will be conducting a
formal postmortem. But of course as someone involved I've been doing a
lot of thinking about it, and reading comments, and a lot of what I've
identified is just simple hindsight.

Here are some of those things:

a) In hindsight, of course we should not have called it a referendum;
it was a survey, or a poll, on various design questions. I don't think
anything specific was intended by the nomenclature one way or another
-- it just started out being called a referendum, and the name stuck,
and by the time people identified problems with that name the pages
had already been translated and it seemed too hard to change it.
Perhaps we should have anyway, given all the drama around the name.
But nothing special was meant by it one way or the other; certainly no
deception about intent.

b) In hindsight I would wanted us to get better analysis
infrastructure set up ahead of time, if I'd realized this would be the
single largest vote in Wikimedia history :) That said -- I am glad we
have learned some things about conducting votes, and I think that the
committee did handle the vote quite well. There are always things to
improve, but they did a great job at handling voting problems
gracefully and getting the results out fast, and I would like to thank
them for all of their work, as well as for handling a difficult topic
well -- committee members got a lot of undeserved personal flak as a
result of volunteering for this job.

c) In hindsight I would have done more to clarify the role of the
board in this process. The board didn't ask for the referendum to be
conducted; Sue did, as part of being directed to implement the board's
resolution. The board has naturally been sent the results, and I acted
as board liaison to the referendum committee, and helped think through
the questions -- but the referendum wasn't specifically a board
project. (The board did ask for the feature to be built in the first
place, however).

d) In hindsight I would have made sure that we had more careful review
of the questions for their utility as survey instruments, perhaps
running them past the research committee. There's not much precedent
for that, but we could start!

e) The big question -- should we have asked "yes or no" or not? I
pushed for not asking this directly because of the premise that we
were asking for broad-scale community input on design, and because the
board had already asked for the thing to be built, and because
"importance" felt like a more subtle measure of where people stood. In
hindsight, given all the controversy and the number of people who if
they were consulted at all wanted to be asked simply yes or no, that
was likely a mistake. People certainly made their views known in the
comments and talk pages though, and I am glad we have that rich input.

f) It's not a surprise to me, or the Board, that this is
controversial; from what the referendum did measure, it seems clear
that the community is fairly split. I am glad that we had the
referendum though, because it did reveal that split to be bimodal and
complex. I have reviewed a sampling of the comments, and along with
the negatives and those opposed on practical and philosophical grounds
there are many positives, and many arguments for why such a feature is
needed. And remember, we did broaden the net so that both long-term
heavy editors and occasional, mostly-reader editors had a chance to
say their piece, which I think was a success in getting much wider and
diverse input that we generally do just here on foundation-l or on
meta talk pages.

So given that, I think we owe it to the community to take both the
negatives and the positives seriously; we cannot in good faith ignore
either side.

Contrary to some speculation on this list, the board did try to think
hard through the pros and cons before asking for what seemed like a
reasonable measure with various protective principles in place (opt-in
only, no change to editorial decisions). None of us want to censor. No
other groups were involved. People's political views were not involved
(Millosh certainly has not accurately represented mine, LOL). No
donors were involved. Nor, in fact, were personal feelings deeply
represented -- I personally had no special feelings one way or the
other regarding the feature when I took on working on this issue for
the board (and I have no special negative feelings about any of our
content, except the poor quality stuff). Our intent as a board was
simply, as Wikimedians, to help the readers of Wikimedia projects.

g) there are lots of great ideas -- in these threads, in the comments
-- for how to implement such a feature, variations on the feature, and
practical and philosophical concerns one way or another (for instance,
I personally love the idea of also adding a link to turn off all
images). We need to work hard at collecting these, integrating them,
making sure we can build something that does what we want while
realizing that there are always tradeoffs between usability,
effectiveness, and what is possible.

Next steps: there's not a hard and fast timeline for the next steps;
we are all thinking and discussing. I expect that Sue will send an
update on what the foundation plans to do within the next few weeks.
There is still in-depth analysis of the referendum results many of us
would like to see, and that will take time. And finally there is a
"next steps" page for the referendum -- there is some very helpful
post-mortem stuff being posted there, so please join in.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image_filter_referendum/Next_steps/en

Thanks for your patience; and thanks, as ever, for being Wikimedians.

-- phoebe, speaking only for herself, not for the board or committee