[Foundation-l] Reflections on the recent debates

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Think future, not past. Think project, not Jimmy.
>
> We do think future: if Jimmy had already carelessly intervened twice
> and caused controversies both time, how can we except the story will
> not repeat.
> We do think project: if we already had careless interventions with
> desysopping, users retiring and wheelwarring, how can we except we
> will not have more users leaving and more users getting upset by being
> ignored?
>
> The deletions themselves aren't the problem; the manner in which they
> were carried out is. As a lawyer you should understand that the due
> process is important.

Well— some of the deletions were clearly a problem. Currently 30% of
Jimmy's deletions have been undone.

The deletions of in use images isn't something we would have decided
to do outright. Instead we probably would have worked to find
replacements if the images were decided to be problematic. The
deletion of in-use work have eroded the trust our customer projects
have in commons (the Germans are referring to this incident as "Vulva
reloaded")... resulting in plans to mass-reupload the deleted works
locally which have mostly been forestalled based on the diligent work
commons admins are performing in getting images which were in use
restored.


To the best of my ability to discern,  none of our customer projects
(many of which allow local image uploads) have guidelines which would
have resolved the concerns with sexually explicit images had they been
applied to commons. This is one of the major complicating factors:
While commons is also in independent educational resource, we are
_also_ a service project for the other projects.


When commons deletes in image a local project would have allowed this
can produce significant bad blood. We have mostly established a good
working relationship around copyright and other areas where commons
tends to be restrictive. But in the case of copyright we could lean on
an understanding of copyright concerns local to every project.
"Commons must be restrictive because it is used by everyone, we can't
let ourselves be used as a back door to violate the policies of XYZ
Wiki". But, example restrictions on sexual content basically do not
exist.  So instead this activity comes off as a back door effort by
commons to override the community decision making on every Wikimedia
project.

(I should be noted that every complaint I'm raising in this message
could have been avoided by simply skipping the images which were in
active use)

If one of the major wikipedia had sexual content restrictions we'd
have an easier time developing a process for commons.  In the absence
of such a restriction on a Wikipedia it's harder to even make the case
that such a rule is even required for commons.