[Foundation-l] Appropriate surprise (Commons stuff)

[Stuart West]

Thanks, Greg.  This is very useful perspective and great background for
those of us without Commons experience.

-stu

On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 1:17 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com> wrote:

> I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my
> experiences with commons.
>
>
> Like many people I've had the experience of bumping into a human
> sexuality related commons category or gallery and thinking "Holy crap!
> Thats a lot of [gallery name].  Freeking teenage pornofreaks!".
>
> But unlike many other people, I am in a position to do something about
> it:  I'm a commons administrator and checkuser reasonably well
> respected in the commons community (when I'm not inactive, at least),
> well connected to the commons star-chamber, and I've played a role in
> many of the internal 'governance by fiat' events.  I think it's likely
> that a majority of my deletions have been technically "out of
> process", but by keeping a good working relationship with the rest of
> the commons community this hasn't been a problem at all.
>
> To take action you have to understand a few things:  "The problem",
> "The lay of the land", and "The goal".
>
> 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!)
> (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and
> libraries
> (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even
> risk bumping into the law (underage models)
>
> I'm sure others can be listed but these are sufficient for now.
>
>
> "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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