[Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

I was following the discussion without ever giving my own opinion, and my
impression is that we are going nowhere.

Imagine we make another poll, properly prepared, and the poll shows, say,
that 65% support the filter and 35% oppose. So what? Concluding then then
the community rejecting the filter would not be a good way of looking at
things. We should not decide such things by majority vote, since the
majority vote leaves underrepresented groups out. We should be looking for
a consensus solution. The poll could still be an important indication on
what solutions are clearly outside the consensus, but we have already many
indications to this point. 

I think what should come next is that one of the filter proponents would
come up with a suggestion for a workable scheme. (I guess the opponents of
the filter would not be so much interested). We had already on this list
for the last couple of weeks a number of schemes proposed, what should
happen now is that somebody summarizes the main suggestions and the
criticism of these suggestions. This will be a good starting point to think
in the further directions and see what is doable and what is acceptable. 

I believe continuing to discuss whether the board should have use
different wording in the statement or whether the poll should have gone
differently is not really constructive. In the end, if we come to the
result that any kind of filter is incompatible with the Wikimedia movement
mission - let it be like this. Then we can discuss pro-filter and
anti-filter forks. But my impression is that we are not yet at this point.

Cheers
Yaroslav