[Foundation-l] [Commons-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

Sun May 9 09:03:18 UTC 2010

I refuse to believe you could read that novel and respond intelligently in
41 minutes.I'm still waiting for the cliff notes version.

^_^

-Jon

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 01:58, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thank you Greg, for this brilliant and personal overview.  Very helpful.
>
> A few thoughts:
>
> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem?
> > (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute  (it's
> > just a big porn site!)
>
> This can be addressed in part by increasing the quality standard for
> our images.  A well-ordered set of anatomy images, in standard
> proscribed frame and format, from an established cross-section of
> races or backgrounds : this would be excellent.  It would also be a
> useful model to follow for all sorts of anatomical images (you could
> use the same models to get entire sets of images of the body).
>
> Likewise, a well-ordered set of images of jewelry and piercings,
> perhaps organized in partnership with a large piercing/jewelry parlor
> in a multiethnic community, would also be easy enough to set up -- and
> would quickly replace the many lazily-shot and casually curated images
> we have today.  (note that I didn't specify genital jewelry and
> piercings; though that would be part of the series).
>
> A gorgeous and professionally made encyclopedia of sexuality might not
> be to some people's tastes, but wouldn't inspire them to say 'just a
> big porn site!', just as the Museum of Sex has acquired a very
> respectable following and media coverage in New York.  That is
> something we should aspire to.
>
> (And if some people want to debate whether we want to host such a
> specialized sub-encyclopedia on Foundation servers, or on servers
> belonging to the Dutch chapter, for fear of overly strict laws in the
> US - that's fine. The point is, this is a topic worth covering
> beautifully and comprehensively, like all important topics, and we
> should not shortchange it.)
>
> > (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and
> libraries
>
> I think there are good solutions here, beginning with communicating
> directly with schools and libraries and find solutions that work for
> them.  For instance, making sure that they have access to
> schools-wikipedia.org and similar snapshot sites until they can find a
> way to provide access to all of wikipedia.
>
> Working on these solutions may be a good way to recruit new teacher
> editors, as well.
>
> > (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even
> > risk bumping into the law (underage models)
>
> This is the easiest one to address.   Requiring proof of model
> release, the way we require proof of copyright release, would be an
> excellent start -- and doing this on general principle, not just in
> cases where a face is recognizable: make sure you have the model's
> permission.  This is simply a philosophical question; we can afford to
> be picky and only host images that we are sure the model was
> comfortable with publishing.
>
>
> SJ
>
>
>
>
> > "The lay of the land"
> >
> >
> > Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must
> > potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty
> > strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very
> > broadly.   In particular the commons community expects the public to
> > also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great
> > big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers
> > the educational mission.
> >
> > There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on
> commons:
> >
> > Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over
> > 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective
> > communication with these customers.  Some Wikimedia projects rely on
> > commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons
> > means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most
> > Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community.  This
> > relationship works because of trust which the commons community has
> > built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making
> > major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues
> > when hasty acts do cause issues.
> >
> > Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a
> > strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a
> > fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF
> > projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly
> > inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only
> > excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human
> > decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on
> > matters of taste.  Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more
> > reliable as an image source for customer projects.
> >
> >
> > I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do
> > with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human
> > sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this
> > message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split
> > between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy
> > is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the
> > policy somehow.
> >
> > There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are
> > offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to
> > curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values.  If
> > this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your
> > personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an
> > effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we
> > not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is
> > effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If
> > you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion
> > is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view
> > you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit.
> > In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the
> > spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community.
> >
> > Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time,
> > but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are
> > lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the
> > discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a
> > big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists
> > everywhere in our projects.
> >
> > There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things
> > like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to
> > sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art,
> > basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored.
> >
> > ... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the
> > languages the discussions are held in.
> >
> > "The goal"
> >
> > Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems?
> >
> > Lets take a category of Penis images as an example.  Load it up.
> > Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this,
> > right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of
> > the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive
> > mission of commons in educating through media).
> >
> > Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and
> > erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP
> > article in some language. An example of every disease with
> > penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already.
> > People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from
> > multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little
> > further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will
> > differ.
> >
> > So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to
> > hundreds of pictures of penises.   Now— commons' hundreds are not so
> > diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms
> > of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational
> > remit we still need a bunch.
> >
> > Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements?   Well,
> > With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast
> > commons as a penis palace.  Thus, in terms of this class of images—
> > problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If
> > someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god;
> > it's full of cocks" response, they can...
> >
> > Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ
> > categorical blocking software.  They block broad categories like
> > "Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the
> > Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories.
> > Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering
> > services are often criticized for blocking information on breast
> > exams, for example.   Because of the way the blocking happens reducing
> > the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely
> > reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way.   So problem (2)
> > seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission.
> >
> > I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy
> > issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces
> > (which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately).
> >
> > Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy
> > to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without
> > privacy problems.  But accepting these images heightens the perception
> > that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting
> > educational resources.
> >
> > The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior
> > attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's
> > consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected.  As a
> > checkuser (with OTRS access)  I can't say that I've seen evidence of
> > abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them.
> >
> > Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily
> > deleted without dispute.  I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit
> > the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no
> > reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other
> > people may get different results.
> >
> > Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things?
> >
> > We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and
> > cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for
> > other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of
> > Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive
> > political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the
> > face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too
> > much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers.  I'm at a
> > loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than
> > photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions
> > commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really
> > hard.
> >
> >
> > Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention:  Commons
> > has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated
> > completely without regard to the community process was described as an
> > "almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about
> > 0.008% of the collection.
> >
> > At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem
> > was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't
> > solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of
> > our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is
> > pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work
> > on.
> >
> > None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance.
> > Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one
> > satisfactorily.
> >
> > The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle
> > several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion.  I expect
> > the same is true for many other contributors.
> >
> > ... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the
> > unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest
> > message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish
> > ex-nupedian,  I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are
> > suddenly in need of a major effort.   I can promise you that a far
> > greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright
> > spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden
> > malware, etc.
> >
> >
> > Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board
> > would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some
> > excusability for disruption to our customer projects.
> >
> > But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the
> > commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we
> > got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal
> > governance.  We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple
> > of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of
> > users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of
> > the deletions.  There is no active discussion about making an
> > improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated
> > forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which
> > is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship.  Many other
> > messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail.
> >
> >
> > I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will
> > foster improved communication on the subject.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
>
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-- 
Jon
[[User:ShakataGaNai]] / KJ6FNQ
http://snowulf.com/
"This email should not be used to sue me" -- Bawolff