[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi Kim,

We keep rehashing the same debates because to some extent we disagree on
what some of the issues are,  what some of the questions mean and even what
some of the words mean.

For example you still use the word censorship when talking about the image
filter, now to me censorship is about somebody deciding for someone else
what they can or can't see or hear. As long as the image filter is about
enabling me to make choices about what I see then I don't consider that as
censorship, and I'm happy for others to also have that choice.

Yes the consultation was flawed. Asking people how important it was wasn't
helpful this time. That would be a great question if you didn't have
development resource for all the interesting projects IT could do and you
wanted people to give the relative importance of cross wiki watchlists, a
better spam filter, WYSIWYG editing and the image filter. But asking people
how important one particular project was without the context of other
projects was always going to have an element of one handed clapping about
it.

There seems to be the assumption that people are divided between "It isn't
important - in fact we shouldn't be doing it at all" and "I've no intention
of using this myself but yes it really is important. Why didn't we do this
years ago?". But there will be some people who took the questions literally
and voted "It is really important, this will break the wiki. Now where's the
Oppose option?" or  "It is completely unimportant to me as I won't use it,
but I have no objection to others having it if they want it".

I would hope that the developers will now be told to try and write something
that finesses as much as possible of the feedback.

But I do hope that when or if it is implemented there is some
anoymised/statistical monitoring of preferences so that people can earn
their PhDs comparing the filtering out and selection for image such as:

Warning not safe for work in some jurisdictions:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yakshi_%28sandstone%29.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parshvanatha_at_V%26A.jpg


WereSpielChequers


> I don't know why people are wigging out so badly about the image filter.
> If
> > people want to use it, great, and if you don't, DON'T. But perhaps I'm
> > misunderstanding something about the idea. I voted for it, and it seems
> the
> > people who dislike the idea are the only one's speaking out on the list.
> >
>
> * There's nothing wrong with the filter program itself
> * The problem is with categorizing things to work with such a program.
> * This is called prejudicial labelling
> * AMA defines prejudicial labelling as "A censoring tool"
> * This definition has existed for over half a century.
>
> We also have huge discussions where it is explained in detail *why* and
> *how*
> such categories can be used for censorship. We also have discussed how a
> category system that starts out innocent and neutral can be subverted to
> serve in a censorship role. No one has found solutions how to prevent that
> from
> happening. AMA certainly hasn't been able to do so in the last 60 years. We
> might be smarter than AMA, but it's a hard problem.
>
> Sincerely,
>        Kim Bruning
>
> I really wish people would read previous discussions.
>
>
>
>