[Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening

Fri May 14 03:51:08 UTC 2010

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This post by David does prove that it is possible to argue, with intellectual integrity, that there are more important things at stake than getting Commons into schools.

Yes.  All of our core principles are designed to maximize the
long-term benefit to humanity of free access to human knowledge; and
those things are generally more important than any specific goal such
as outreach to schools.

David Goodman writes:
>>  if we do not offer comprehensive free uncensored but
>> reliable information, who will?

This is well said, as is the rest of your post.  Having comprehensive
free uncensored reliable information is essential to our mission.  So
is having information that is freely available to everyone.  But there
are barriers to both of these goals, and we will realize each of them
partly on our own and partly through collaboration with other
projects.

Other comments:

* Currently we do censor in the name of notability.  In particular,
established groups of editors censor the work of those who have
different notability standards.   Is this the right approach to take,
or do you see those subselections also happening outside of a big tent
for uncensored knowledge?

 * The Matthew effect has implications: modest changes to how
welcoming we are can significantly expand the community contributing
to free knowledge -- in a way that the right to fork has not.  And
unfriendliness often stems from editors who are "defending core
principles" on the wikis.  So it is worth finding ways to uphold our
principles respectfully, without driving people away.

About China's big online encyclopedias:

> All we can do in response is continue our own model, and hope that
> at some point their social values will change to see the virtues of it.

There is more that we can and should do.  We should acknowledge the
good work Hudong and Baike are doing to share knowledge - tremendously
furthering part of our mission (if not the 'uncensored' part,
certainly encouraging a generation of collaborators). [1]

And, as with the Encyclopedia of Life, we should recognize that they
are providing very meaningful cooperative competition.  They are
exploring different ways of presenting knowledge, creating views for
multiple audiences, and building social networks and games around
knowledge-creation -- all things we should be thinking hard about.  We
can learn quite a bit from one another before stumbling over
licensing.

Sam

[1] Hudong's 'learn, create, collaborate' is a good slogan.

>> From: David Goodman <dgoodmanny at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Sexual Imagery on Commons: where the discussion is happening
>> To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List" <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Date: Wednesday, 12 May, 2010, 21:50
>> Even more than what  Ray says:
>>
>>  if we do not offer comprehensive free uncensored but
>> reliable
>> information, who will?  Other sites may feel they have
>> to censor;
>> other  uncensored sites may and mostly do have little
>> standards of
>> reliability. Some uncensored reliable sites are likely to
>> require some
>> form of payment, either directly or through advertising or
>> government
>> support.   If there is a audience for
>> compromised sources of
>> information, there are many organizations eager to provide
>> it.
>>
>> Other free uncensored reliable projects can be very
>> important in their
>> sphere, but we have an almost universal range. We're at
>> present
>> unique, which we owe  to the historical fact  of
>> having been able to
>> attract a large community, committed to free access in
>> every sense,
>> operating in a manner which requires no financial support
>> beyond what
>> can be obtained from voluntary contributions, and tied to
>> no groups
>> with pre-existing agendas--except the general agenda of
>> free
>> information.   That we alone have been able
>> to get there is initially
>> the courage and vision of the founders, their correct guess
>> that the
>> conventional wisdom that this would be unworkable was
>> erroneous, the
>> general world-wide attractiveness of the notion of free
>> information,
>> and, at this point , the Matthew effect, that we are of
>> such size and
>> importance that working here is likely to be more
>> attractive and more
>> effective than working elsewhere--and thus our continuing
>> ability to
>> attract very large numbers of volunteer workers of many
>> cultural
>> backgrounds.
>>
>> We have everything to lose by compromising any of the
>> principles. To
>> the extent we ever become commercial, or censored , or
>> unreliable, we
>> will be submerged in the mass of better funded information
>> providers.
>> On the contrary, they have an interest in supporting what
>> we do,
>> because we provide  what they cannot and give the
>> basis for
>> specialized endeavors. If there is a wish for a similar but
>> censored
>> service, this can be best done  by forking ours; if
>> there is a wish to
>> abandon NPOV or permit commercialism, by expanding on our
>> basis. We do
>> not discourage these things; our licensing is in fact
>> tailored to
>> permitting them--but we should stay distinct from them. We
>> have
>> provided a general purpose feed and suitable metadata, and
>> what the
>> rest of the world does is up to them--our goal is not to
>> monopolize
>> the provision of information. We need not provide
>> specialized
>> hooks--just continue our goal for improved quality and
>> organization of
>> the content and the metadata.
>>
>> That China has chosen to take parts of our model and
>> develop
>> independently in line with its government's policy, rather
>> than
>> forking us,  is possible because of the size of the
>> government effort
>> and, like us, the very large potential number of interested
>> and
>> willing highly literate and well-educated participants. All
>> we can do
>> in response is continue our own model, and hope that at
>> some point
>> their social values will change to see the virtues of it.
>> If some
>> other countries do similarly, we will at least have
>> contributed the
>> idea of a workable very large scale intent encyclopedia
>> with user
>> input. All information is good, though free information is
>> better. If
>> those in the Anglo-american sphere wish to censor, they
>> know at least
>> they have a potent uncensored competitor that it practice
>> will also be
>> available, which cannot but induce therm to a more liberal
>> policy than
>> if we did not have our standards.
>>
>> I wish very much Citizendium had succeeded--the existence
>> of
>> intellectual coopetition is a good thing. Even as it is, I
>> think they
>> have been a strong force in causing us to improve our
>> formerly
>> inadequate standards of reliability--as well as
>> demonstrating by their
>> failure the need for a very large committed group to
>> emulate what we
>> have accomplished, and also demonstrating the unworkability
>> of
>> excessively rigid organization and an exclusively
>> expert-bound
>> approach to content. I'm glad Larry did what he did in
>> founding
>> it--had it achieved more ,so would we have also.
>>
>>
>> David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 2:55 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net>
>> wrote:
>> > Milos Rancic wrote:
>> >> On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 8:35 PM, Ray Saintonge
>> <saintonge at telus.net>
>> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>> Milos Rancic wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>> On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Sue
>> Gardner <sgardner at wikimedia.org>
>> wrote:
>> >>>>
>> >>>>> Let me know if I'm missing anything
>> important.
>> >>>>>
>> >>>> Actually, yes. In spite of multicultural
>> nature of Wikimedia, this
>> >>>> process shouldn't be formulated as purely
>> related to sexual content,
>> >>>> but as related to cultural taboos or to
>> "offensive imagery" if we want
>> >>>> to use euphemism.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Under the same category are:
>> >>>> * sexual content;
>> >>>> * images Muhammad;
>> >>>> * images of sacral places of many tribes;
>> >>>> * etc.
>> >>>>
>> >>> I'm sure you mean "sacred" instead of "sacral"
>> :-) .
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >> I've just went to Wikipedia [1] (accidentally,
>> instead of Wiktionary)
>> >> to see the difference between "sacral" and
>> "sacred" and I've seen that
>> >> those words are synonyms. Anyhow, it is good to
>> know that "sacral" is
>> >> at leas ambiguous. ("Sacral" is a borrowed word in
>> Serbian, too; and
>> >> Latin words make life easier to one native speaker
>> of Serbian when he
>> >> speaks English [and some other languages] :) )
>> >>
>> >>
>> >
>> > Borrowed words can also be false friends.  "Sacral"
>> as "sacred" tends to
>> > be a more recent and specialized usage of the word,
>> applicable to,
>> > according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
>> anthropology and religion.
>> > Sometimes for me the danger is to know the language
>> too well, and in the
>> > present context that started with pornographic images
>> I only too easily
>> > imagined a series of photos about the "sacral places"
>> of individuals. :-D
>> >
>> >>> Censoring by default puts us back in the same
>> old conflict of having to
>> >>> decide what to censor.  Given a random 100
>> penis pictures we perhaps
>> >>> need to ask questions like what distinguishes
>> penis picture #27 from
>> >>> penis picture #82.  The same could be asked
>> about numerous photographs
>> >>> of national penises like the Washington
>> Monument or Eiffel Tower.
>> >>>
>> >> ...
>> >>
>> >>> Voting is evil, particularly when it
>> entrenches the tyranny of the majority.
>> >>>
>> >> People should be able to choose categories and to
>> vote about them.
>> >>
>> >
>> > That doesn't seem very practical. The choice of
>> categories would itself
>> > be the source of disputes. If what is seen depends on
>> where one lives
>> > there would be an endless stream of variations that
>> could not be easily
>> > tracked. A 51% vote can as easily go in the opposite
>> direction on the
>> > very next day.
>> >> That part of proposal is not about denying to
>> anyone to see something,
>> >> but to put defaults on what not logged in users
>> could see. There
>> >> should be a [very] visible link, like on Google
>> images search, which
>> >> would easily overwrite the default rules. Personal
>> permission would
>> >> overwrite them, too. (If I was not clear up to
>> now, "cultural
>> >> censorship" won't forbid to anyone to see
>> anything. It would be just
>> >> *default*, which could be easily overwritten.)
>> >>
>> >
>> > I agree that users' choice should be paramount. Making
>> that choice needs
>> > to be carefully worded.  Simply putting, "Do you want
>> to see dirty
>> > pictures?" on the Main Page would inspire people to
>> actively look for
>> > those pictures.
>> >> The point is that "cultural censorship" should
>> reflect dominant
>> >> position of one culture. My position is that we
>> shouldn't define that
>> >> one of our goals is to enlighten anyone. We should
>> build knowledge
>> >> repository and everyone should be free to use it.
>> However, if some
>> >> culture is oppressive and not permissive, it is
>> not up to us to
>> >> *actively* work on making that culture not
>> oppressive and permissive.
>> >> The other issue is that I strongly believe that
>> free and permissive
>> >> cultures are superior in comparison with other
>> ones.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Reflecting the dominance of one culture is dangerous,
>> and in the extreme
>> > has led to genocidal behaviour, and served to make the
>> great inquisition
>> > holy.
>> >
>> > It is somewhat naïve to believe that we can limit
>> ourselves to strictly
>> > factual data. There is implicit enlightenment in the
>> choice of which
>> > facts to present. The encyclopedists of the 18th
>> century likely thought
>> > of themselves as bringers of enlightenment. The 1389
>> Battle of Kosovo is
>> > of great historical importance to Serbs, but another
>> group might not
>> > attach such importance to a battle from more than six
>> centuries ago and
>> > omit iit entirely.
>> >
>> > I agree that liberating oppressed people is not one of
>> our tasks.  We
>> > should not be the ones going into China or Iran to
>> make a fuss when
>> > those governments have blocked access to Wikimedia
>> projects. That's up
>> > to the residents of those countries. Nor should we
>> alter our
>> > presentation of data when those governments insist on
>> their version of
>> > the truth.  It's unfortunate that some governments
>> would view a
>> > dispassionate treatment of facts as subversive.
>> >
>> >> So, basically, if residents of Texas decide to
>> censor all images of
>> >> Bay Area, including the Golden Gate Bridge,
>> because they worry that
>> >> Bay Area values are transmissible via Internet (as
>> they are), I don't
>> >> have anything against it. If more than 50% of
>> Wikipedia users from
>> >> Texas think so, let it be. Other inhabitants of
>> Texas would need just
>> >> to simply click on "I don't want to be censored"
>> if they are not
>> >> logged in, or they could adjust their settings as
>> they like if they
>> >> are logged in.
>> >>
>> >
>> > Maybe Texas should not have given up its independence
>> in 1846. The city
>> > of Austin has a reputation for having more liberal
>> views than most of
>> > the state. Should it have its own criteria? Community
>> standards do not
>> > give a stable criterion. Is the Bay Area to be treated
>> any differently
>> > from the Los Angeles area?
>> >> But, I would be, of course, completely fine if we
>> implement censorship
>> >> just on [voluntary] personal basis and thus just
>> for logged in users.
>> >> (As well as we don't implement censorship at
>> all.)
>> >>
>> > Of course. If teachers or parents want to restrict
>> what is available to
>> > children they must accept the responsibility for doing
>> so.  They can't
>> > go on expecting that broadly distributed websites will
>> do this for
>> > them.  If the internet is an inappropriate babysitter
>> it's up to the
>> > parents to hire a better one.
>> >
>> > Ec
>> >
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