[Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

[phoebe ayers]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 2:18 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there anyone who disagrees that we need to hold to the policies:
>
> 1. that the WMF projects as a whole contains only material --of any
> sort , on any topic-- with informative or educational value,

Maybe we need a new motto for Commons: "just 'cause it's free, doesn't
mean it's good."

Given that:
a) commons is not a host for people's personal photo collections
b) some of the pr0nz is obviously part of a personal collection

I don't actually see what the problem is necessarily in deleting it.
It's called editorial judgment, and as I have been telling people for
years and years on Wikipedia, editorial judgment =/= censorship. You
may write the most awesome novel to ever have been written, but that
doesn't mean it's fit for Wikipedia. Similarly, you may have the most
righteous CC-BY pictures of naked people or your birthday party or
your neighbor's cat or whatever, but that doesn't mean any of it needs
to go -- or should go -- in Commons.

I know, I know, my whitebread American puritan morals (ha!) shouldn't
affect the sacred contents of the Commons, but seriously, no one
objects when I edit articles to uphold the long-held editorial
standards of Wikipedia, and I try hard to be NPOV when I edit there.
Similarly, I think it is entirely possible to consider issues such as
duplicative content, educational value, purpose of the image, use in
the projects, technical quality, etc. and come to a very reasonable
conclusion that not everything belongs in Commons and it needs a good
weeding. We are not, after all, the interweb's fileserver for
whatever.

This is an entirely separate issue from whether Jimmy went about being
bold in the correct manner, and it would probably be helpful to
remember that. As a strict *user* of commons, rather than a
contributor, I would personally like to have less junk to wade through
when trying to find pictures of something!

-- phoebe