[Foundation-l] 86% of german users disagree with the introduction of the personal image filter

Tobias Oelgarte tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com
Fri Sep 16 20:21:28 UTC 2011


Am 16.09.2011 21:57, schrieb Andre Engels:
> On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 9:13 PM, Tobias Oelgarte<
> tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>
>> I would not have any problems if we would not play in the hands of
>> censors (local ISPs, a simple proxy, regimes, institutions, ...) by
>> actually labeling content as objectionable. Which gives away the control
>> over the content by the user itself, while no one would invest the money
>> if he would need to label the content itself.
>>
> So how do you expect those censors to use this?
Just ask yourself what our Wikipedia interface would do. The server 
provide the images (HTML-Documents with <img> tag) along with labels. 
Depending on the settings of the user some kind of Javascript will hide 
the images. This "passed along" labels could simply be used to exclude 
the image as the whole, making the "show image" button disappear. Since 
Wikipedia serves more or less static pages, due to seriously needed 
caching, the labels will need to be passed that way.

Now you should think about topic and try to understand why this opens 
for a new kind of censorship. Blocking Wikipedia as a whole is a problem 
for most providers. This will cause users to change the provider or to 
insist to have access to it. This is a pressure put onto the access 
provider. The provider itself isn't able to filter the image or the 
content, since this is a lot of working time and time costs money. But 
if we choose to label the content for no fee, we open a new field for 
partial censorship. The users could still access it, but they won't see 
anything. In the result there would be some complaints. But way less 
complaints as if Wikipedia wasn't present at all.

A good compromise for a censor.
>>>> How would you expect to find a good compromise in decisions on what to
>>>> filter and what not? Do you intend to put an extremist conservative Arab
>>>> and and the most liberal German inside the same room, close the door, go
>>>> away, come back after two weeks and look if they could find a compromise
>>>> about Yes or No? How should this work?
>>>>
>>> Quite simple: add one filter for each, and describe for each what they
>>> filter, then let every user for themself decide whether to filter the
>> one,
>>> the other, neither or both.
>> You should know that there are hundreds of phobias, cultural conflicts
>> and other categories of possibly objectionable content. Do you expect us
>> to manage all this categories of filtering, or would you say that it
>> will be narrowed down to be user friendly and manageable, while leaving
>> out some categories and ignore the complies of some minorities?
>>>> The referendum showed that cultural neutrality is important for the
>>>> voters. But how do you think to find a compromise between hell and
>>>> heaven, without having hell and heaven inside the discussions at commons
>>>> at earth?
>>>>
>>> See above - if your filters are not almost the same, don't use the same
>>> filter, but create two different ones.
>>>
>> See above at my comment. Maybe we should put this questioning together
>> as one fact.
>>
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