[Foundation-l] Jimbo's Sexual Image Deletions

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:15 AM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
> What I can say to your questions is that Jimmy informed the board about
> his intention and asked the board for support. Don't speaking for other
> board members, just speak for myself. I answered his mail with that I
> fully support his engagement.
>
> Personally, I think that the board is responsible for defining the scope
> and basic rules of the projects. While for projects like Wikipedia,
> Wikisource, Wiktionary the scope is more or less easier to define. On
> Wikipedia we have the five pillars as our basic rules. But we have also
> some projects that have a scope that is not quite so clear and no such
> basic rules. Commons is one of these projects, and the most important one.
>
> Fact is, there is no consensus in the community as what is educational
> or potentially educational for Commons. And as far as I see there would
> probably never be a concensus. And I think this is where the board
> should weigh in. To define scopes and basic rules. This is why the board
> made this statement.
>
> For me, this statement is at the first line a support for Jimmy's
> effort. It is a soft push from the board to the community to move in a
> direction. Both Jimmy as well as me believe that the best way for the
> board to do things is to give guidance to the communities. But, this
> topic is already pending for years. Looking back into the archives of
> foundation-l or village pump of Commons there were enough discussions.
> If the problem cannot be solved inside of the community, it is my
> believe it is the duty of the board and every board member to solve the
> problem.
>
> Ting
>
> Thomas Dalton wrote:
>> On 7 May 2010 20:30, Jan-Bart de Vreede <janbart at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I would like to point you to:
>>>
>>> http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaannounce-l/2010-May/000008.html
>>>
>>
>> My interpretation of that is that Jimmy's unilateral deletions are not
>> done with the support of the rest of the board, since the email talks
>> about encouraging the community to deal with the problem. Is that
>> correct?
>>
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Ting, this is your statement about sexually explicit content from the
last elections [1]:

"First of all I my position to this point had not changed since last
year. I think content in Wikimedia projects should be educational,
nothing more and nothing less. I think the communities of our major
projects are meanwhile good enough to decide what is in scope and what
not. This as overall principle.

In most part of the world even pure educational content has some
restriction of age, sometimes even per law. I think the Foundation
should take this into account and give the community the possibility
to act in accordance with the local laws if they decide to. From this
point of view my suggestion is the following:

The foundation should develop the MediaWiki software so that some
content that are tagged with an age restriction would not be shown
immediately if one comes to such an article. Only if the user confirms
that he is above the age limit the content would be revealed. I
believe this suggestion was already made by Erik a few years ago and I
think we should do it.
The board of trustees should issue a resolution in the form like the
BPL resolution that announces the feature and call for the
responsibility of the community to use this feature in accordance with
the community consensus."

I see here two things:
* You didn't mention that sexually explicit content should be deleted.
* You said that it is Board's responsibility to create a feature, not
any kind of community's responsibility [out of the scope of particular
legal systems].

In that sense, I want to ask you what did Board do except supporting
Jimmy to delete many images of educational value?

[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2009/Candidates/Questions/1#Sexual_content_on_WMF