[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content

[Alec Conroy]

On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Mike Godwin <mnemonic at gmail.com> wrote:

> There's also no urgent legal issue driving any changes to Commons -- we
> don't have reason to believe any category of content we knowingly carry on
> Commons is definitionally illegal under U.S. law. (Obviously, when if people
> upload content that is illegal, and we're informed about its presence, we'll
> remove it -- most likely, volunteers will remove it even before it gets the
> attention of the Foundation staff.)
>
> If we judge Commons content simply on the basis of "Does this content serves
> the mission of the projects?" there is no doubt that some content will
> removed, some offensive content will not be removed, and Commons will no
> longer be a kind of "dumping ground" for anything and everything regardless
> of whether content lacks encyclopedic usefulness. As a side-effect of this,
> you probably get both (a) a resource that is somewhat more "family friendly"
> (because the sheer frequency of merely offensive images is reduced) and (b)
> a resource that remains essentially "uncensored," consistent with its
> encyclopedic mission.  (I use "uncensored" here to mean "not edited merely
> to avoid offense.")


Hi Mike!  Longtime fan, first-time emailer. :)
First of all, I want to say I've seen a couple of people questioned
your integrity today, and I was very sorry to see that.   I was really
happy when I heard you were joining us, and I haven't seen anything
here today from you but a nice guy calmly trying to help things. :)

I think the reason you're having a hard time getting people to discuss
the policy formation is that, overall, there isn't that much
disagreement among the bulk of the community.

We all basically agree that there has to be a limit to the images in
Commons.  We all agree that images which aren't helping the project or
a sibling project probably don't need to be hanging out on Commons.
It's not flickr, and we're all basically okay with the fact that it's
not flickr.

The only reason this dispute exists is because one side of the dispute
is the founder.