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

[Kim Bruning]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 07:12:04PM -0400, Risker wrote:
> >
> 
> 
> Oh please, Kim; this is nonsense.  

Be careful with what you call nonsense. :-)

> Commercially available software is, even
> right now, blocking certain content areas by category and/or keywords for
> (at minimum) Commons and English Wikipedia;

Yes. These tools also have a category system. That category system
is structured very differently from the commons category system. 

Just because mediawiki uses a database and wordpress uses a
database, it doesn't mean that the two databases are
interchangable. That's just silly! (try it and see if you don't
believe me)

The same is true for categories (which are just a particular way
to structure a database anyway). Just because mediawiki uses
categories, and ACME CensorThemAll(tm) uses categories, doesn't
mean that they are necessarily interchangable in any way.

>  I've seen it in operation. 

Let me check: Have seen your image filter software actually
directly use categories from commons? Are you sure?

> So there's no reason to believe that the current category
> system, which we use legitimately for content-finding, is not
> amenable to use in exactly the same way that an
> image-filter-specific category would be.

It would require some amount of remapping before it could be
practically used in that manner. 

sincerely,
	Kim Bruning



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