[Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter - magical flying unicorn pony that s***s rainbows

[Tobias Oelgarte]

Am 21.09.2011 18:41, schrieb Andrew Gray:
> On 21 September 2011 16:53, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>> They do it by crowdsourcing a mass American bias, don't they?
>>
>> An American POV being enforced strikes me as a problematic solution.
>>
>> (I know that FAQ says "global community". What they mean is "people
>> all around the world who are Silicon Valley technologists like us -
>> you know, normal people." This approach also has a number of fairly
>> obvious problems.)
> I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago, I think, but this effect cuts both ways.
>
> We already know that our community skews to - as you put it - "people
> all around the world who are technologists like us". As a result, that
> same community is who decides what images are reasonable and
> appropriate to put in articles.
>
> People look at images and say - yes, it's appropriate, yes, it's
> encyclopedic, no, it's excessively violent, no, that's gratuitous
> nudity, yes, I like kittens, etc etc etc. You do it, I do it, we try
> to be sensible, but we're not universally representative. The
> community, over time, imposes its own de facto standards on the
> content, and those standards are those of - well, we know what our
> systemic biases are. We've not managed a quick fix to that problem,
> not yet.
>
> One of the problems with the discussions about the image filter is
> that many of them argue - I paraphrase - that "Wikipedia must not be
> censored because it would stop being neutral". But is the existing
> "Wikipedian POV" *really* the same as "neutral", or are we letting our
> aspirations to inclusive global neutrality win out over the real state
> of affairs? It's the great big unexamined assumption in our
> discussions...
You describe us as geeks and that we can't write in a way that would 
please the readers. Since we are geeks, we are strongly biased and write 
down POV all day. If that is true, why is Wikipedia such a success? Why 
people read it? Do they like geeky stuff?

Don't you think that we would have thousands of complaints a day if your 
words would be true at all? Just have a look at the article [[hentai]] 
and look at the illustration. How many complaints about this image do we 
get a day? None, because it is less then one complain in a month, while 
the article itself is viewed about 8.000 times a day.[1] That would make 
up one complainer in 240.000 (0,0004%). Now we could argue that only 
some of them would comment on the issue. Lets assume 1 of 100 or even 1 
of 1000. Then it are still only 0,04% or 0,4%. That is the big mass of 
users we want to support get more contributers?

[1] http://stats.grok.se/en/201109/hentai