[Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter - magical flying unicorn pony that s***s rainbows

[Andrew Gray]

On 21 September 2011 16:53, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> They do it by crowdsourcing a mass American bias, don't they?
>
> An American POV being enforced strikes me as a problematic solution.
>
> (I know that FAQ says "global community". What they mean is "people
> all around the world who are Silicon Valley technologists like us -
> you know, normal people." This approach also has a number of fairly
> obvious problems.)

I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, I think, but this effect cuts both ways.

We already know that our community skews to - as you put it - "people
all around the world who are technologists like us". As a result, that
same community is who decides what images are reasonable and
appropriate to put in articles.

People look at images and say - yes, it's appropriate, yes, it's
encyclopedic, no, it's excessively violent, no, that's gratuitous
nudity, yes, I like kittens, etc etc etc. You do it, I do it, we try
to be sensible, but we're not universally representative. The
community, over time, imposes its own de facto standards on the
content, and those standards are those of - well, we know what our
systemic biases are. We've not managed a quick fix to that problem,
not yet.

One of the problems with the discussions about the image filter is
that many of them argue - I paraphrase - that "Wikipedia must not be
censored because it would stop being neutral". But is the existing
"Wikipedian POV" *really* the same as "neutral", or are we letting our
aspirations to inclusive global neutrality win out over the real state
of affairs? It's the great big unexamined assumption in our
discussions...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk