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

[David Gerard]

On 22 October 2011 23:36, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> A show/hide all images function is likely too drastic to serve some of
> these use cases well. So for example, if you're at work, you might not
> want to have autofellatio on your screen by accident, but you'd be
> annoyed at having to un-hide a fabulous screenshot of a wonderful
> piece of open source software in order to mitigate that risk.


... That's the convincing use case? "But I might have to click for a
software screenshot"? Really?

That's really not an even slightly convincing justification for a huge
and controversial infrastructure addition to all Wikimedia projects.

I say this keeping in mind that this thread is about people who
already don't trust the Foundation, and how to get them back, rather
than have the Board's insistence on an image filter catalyse a fork.
You (and they) will need actually convincing examples.

My use case for work is actually pretty close to this, and
click-to-show would be just fine (and is exactly what I want). I
realise I'm speaking only for me personally. Though I note it also
solves the case for Sarah Stierch's example of looking up [[human
penis]] at work.


> With that said, the mobile site already has a generic "Disable images"
> view and something similar would definitely make sense on the main
> site as well.


I just tried it. It lacks the "click to show" feature. Add that and
I'll start using the mobile interface by default at work immediately.


> If both options were available (marking images as
> collapsible in a standard way, & show/hide all for all media),
> communities could evolve standards and practices within that framework
> as they see fit.


Collapsibility, and various variants on a per-image show/hide filter,
was rejected on en:wp in 2005 or 2006 when the [[autofellatio]]
controversies were at their height. (I went looking for the link
recently and couldn't find it, but it ran for quite a while and got
quite a lot of votes - anyone?) Making it available will require a
proper on-wiki poll on each project, rather than imposition from
above.


- d.