[Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter

[Thomas Dalton]

On 21 September 2011 18:37, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 19:10, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What is the advantage of that compared with the feature as it was
>> originally proposed? All you've done is made the URL more complicated.
>> You'll still need to use user preferences to determine which images
>> are getting hidden, so why can't you just have an "on/off" user
>> preference as well rather than determining whether the filter should
>> be on or off based on the URL?
>
> * People should have possibility to choose the set of images which
> they don't want to see.

Nobody has said otherwise.

> * As it's not the main site, but wrapper, it could have turned off
> images offensive to anyone, so everybody would be able to see the site
> without having to log in. It could lead to "no images" by default, but
> that's not my problem.

That would just be an image-free version of the site - you can't try
and determine which images could possibly be offensive to someone
without just concluding that they all could. We could have a special
URL for turning off images, I suppose. It would probably be better to
just have "?noimages" on the end rather than giving it a URL that
makes it look like it's supposed to be a separate site.

> * They could experiment, as nobody would care about the site. As
> Tobias mentioned below, if some text is offensive to someone, they
> could add it into the filter.

Since the filter is opt-in anyway, I don't really see the advantage
here. If people don't care about the safe.x version of the site then
they will care equally little about the regular site with preferences
set to filter images.

> * Most importantly, that won't affect anything else. Except, probably,
> ~$1M/year of WMF budget for development of censorship software and
> censorship itself, as they will say that they lack of people to censor
> images and that they need employees to do that. Although it would be
> more useful to give that ~$1M/year for access to Wikipedia from
> African countries, I think that it's reasonable price for having
> people who want censorship content. Bottom line is that News Corp will
> pay all of that and much more by giving us free access to Fox News.

An opt-in filter using the same URL as everything else won't affect
anything else either.