[Gendergap] Resolution:Images of identifiable people

[phoebe ayers]

On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Sarah Stierch <sarah.stierch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>>
>> Sydney -- all good ideas, for sure! The resolution was intended as a
>> (re)focusing device, as you note; and there is still lots of work to
>> be done. One of the areas is making sure that all wikis have a similar
>> policy. Would it help to put together a page on meta to coordinate
>> this?
>>
>
>
> I'm not sure if we're ready to move it to meta yet, I do wish we had a more
> private place to develop this. It's a rather sensitive topic for folks.
> Perhaps a google doc or...?
>
>
> Sarah

This is totally anecdotal, but I have been pretty pleasantly surprised
with the reaction to the identifiable people resolution. It has
induced some grumbling because of extra workloads, and there are
images in debatable circumstances (beach: public or not?) that have
gotten argued over, but I haven't seen any real opposition to the
principle of model consent.

I think public discussion is good for a few reasons:
* it helps highlight the issue, which can bring more people in; we
shouldn't assume that everyone interested already knows about this
resolution/issue (obviously you didn't ;)
* it helps alleviate concerns about cabalism or cliquishness, which is
the perpetual bane of online communities;
* it helps provide documentation in a way that we know is backed up,
and will be so for the foreseeable future
* and it provides a place that people on other wikis can link and refer to
* finally, I don't think documenting project policy and similar is a
particularly sensitive issue. Other things (individual requests etc.)
might be; but that wasn't really what I was thinking of here.

Digression: Like Brandon I have mixed feelings about g-docs, and I
wish we had a better solution for what they are good at. I do think
that they tend to sequester information in a way that is often
unhelpful over the long term. I was a pretty early adopter of google
docs, and I look at my folder sometimes and wonder how much knowledge
about Wikimania planning is hidden away in there, inaccessible and
therefore useless to anyone else -- too much, that's for sure.

cheers,
Phoebe