[Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork

[Erik Moeller]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 2:51 PM, Tobias Oelgarte
<tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com> wrote:
> What approaches do you have in mind, that would empower the editors and
> the readers, aside from an hide/show all solution?

1) Add a "collapsible" [*] parameter to the File: syntax, e.g.
[[File:Lemonparty.jpg|collapsible]].
2) When present, add a notice [*] to the top of the page enabling the
reader to collapse collapsible images (and to make that the default
setting for all pages if desired).
3) When absent, do nothing.

[*] The exact UI language here could be discussed at great length, but
is irrelevant to the basic operating principles.

Advantages:
* Communities without consensus to use collapsible media don't have to
until/unless such a consensus emerges. It can be governed by normal
community policy.
* One community's judgments do not affect another community's.
Standards can evolve and change over time and in the cultural context.
* Readers of projects like Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedia (which are
already collapsing images) who are currently not empowered to choose
between "collapsed by default" vs. "expanded by default" would be
enabled to do so.
* Readers only encounter the notice on pages that actually have
content where it's likely to be of any use.
* Respects the editorial judgment of the community, as opposed to
introducing a parallel track of "controversial content assessment".
Doesn't pretend that a technical solution alone can solve social and
editorial challenges.
* Easy to implement, easy to iterate on, easy to disable if there are issues.

Disadvantages:
* Doesn't help with the specific issues of Wikimedia Commons (what's
educational scope) and with issues like sorting images of masturbation
with electric toothbrushes into the toothbrush category. Those are
arguably separate issues that should be discussed separately.
* Without further information about what our readers want and don't
want, we're reinforcing pre-existing biases (whichever they may be) of
each editorial community, so we should also consider ways to
continually better understand our audience.

Erik