[Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 16:07, Thomas Morton
<morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Yes, but guaranteed you're going to end up with readers asking why on earth
> they have to go through and manually implement these filters; they'll want
> some defaults they can "just use". I posit that the majority of people
> wanting to use this thing will likely want to simply click "Do not show me
> images of X" and leave it there. This is not a scientific study of what the
> reader wants - we do need to do one of those - just my RL experience of how
> web users interact.
>
> I recall a message in an previous thread that went into ideas of how to do
> this in a less centralised way (to avoid the idea of it not being our job to
> censor).

That would mean that pornography exists just on Wikimedia Commons.
Those who censor sexually explicit and other images use censorship
software.

> The problem I see here is that editors are a biased group to poll in
> relation to this - this is a tool for readers, and it should be up to the
> readers to comment on what they would like to see. The editorship has an
> anti-censorship view, and largely will not approve of using this tool
> themselves (Not Censored etc.). However I suspect a large number of readers
> do feel differently... if only we knew the figures...
>
> I'm not sure why we would necessarily let editors stall that feature request
> - or  why we are primarily polling editors and not readers about this
> situation.
>
> I'd like to see some user studies done to see what the wider response to
> this idea might be...
>
> As an encyclopaedia we consistently forget that for *all* of us the readers
> are our customers, and represent the vast majority of people using Wikipedia
> - and we should be improving the software for them as much as for the editor
> community.

The *first* instance to be asked about such thing are editors, not
readers. I mean, the first question is "Do *we* want it?". Readers
opinion could be one of the arguments in discussion; likely one of the
most important ones; but decision should be on editors. And Board
should act in opposition to editors just if there is serious threat
for the project existence. However, nobody gave any reason in favor of
avoiding editors' will in favor of Board's decision. Nothing rational,
just personal wishes of a couple of people. And, again, if those
wishes could pass without a lot of drama, I would be fine with it.
However, that's not the case.