[Foundation-l] Image filter

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* me at marcusbuck.org wrote:
>I just want to point out that an idea like a free community-driven  
>everybody-can-edit-it encyclopedia with no editorial or peer-review  
>process would never have been created if a long discussion would have  
>preceded its creation. The scepticists would have raised so many  
>seemingly valid concerns that they'd buried the idea deep. I'm feeling  
>that a group of worst-case scenarioists are leading the discussion to  
>a point where the image filter is buried just because everybody is  
>bored about the discussion.

Make a category system, set up a web site where people can see an image
and select which categories it belongs to, and then let people fill the
database. Let's say setting the site for doing this up takes a man-day,
and it should take only about a man-year to categorize all images.

Simple example: let's say 4791 users categorize on average 1 image per
second, then each user would have to spend less than 40 minutes on this
to categorize all of Wikimedia Commons. That's the number of people who
agreed the most strongly to the first "referendum" statement.

You could add another man-day to make a user script that people can add
to their vector.js file or whatever that uses the data to hide images.
So that's something like $100 for server setup, a weekend spent coding,
and less than an hour of work by those who feel the most strongly about
offering this feature. Plus whatever it takes to design the categories.
As a rule of thumb based approximation -- this is not business planning.

Discussing this in terms of whether the Wikimedia Foundation should host
the categorization system, whether Wikimedia Foundation funds should be
used to develop the system, whether the categories should be maintained
as part of existing Wikimedia projects like Wikimedia Commons, etc., is
a choice that the proponents of this feature have made. And they appear
to be getting what they asked for. They can ignore the objections, build
it outside Wikimedia infrastructure, outside the Wikipedia community.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern at hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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