[Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter

[Tobias Oelgarte]

Am 21.09.2011 19:37, schrieb Milos Rancic:
> On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 19:10, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> What is the advantage of that compared with the feature as it was
>> originally proposed? All you've done is made the URL more complicated.
>> You'll still need to use user preferences to determine which images
>> are getting hidden, so why can't you just have an "on/off" user
>> preference as well rather than determining whether the filter should
>> be on or off based on the URL?
> * People should have possibility to choose the set of images which
> they don't want to see.
They already have this choice. Just hide images and life without them. 
We have no way guarantee that our expectations on filtering will meet 
the expectation of the audience. How will they choose the images _they_ 
don't want to see? Hundreds of categories to comply with diverse 
sensibilities?
> * As it's not the main site, but wrapper, it could have turned off
> images offensive to anyone, so everybody would be able to see the site
> without having to log in. It could lead to "no images" by default, but
> that's not my problem.
That isn't the problem. What is the difference to type an different URL 
or to click a button. This does change nothing beside the fact that we 
would have two different URLs now. It's a "solution" for a not existing 
problem (with or without image filter). Actually it would create one 
additional deficit. The user would have no categories to choose from. 
Something you requested in your first point. It makes things even worse.
> * They could experiment, as nobody would care about the site. As
> Tobias mentioned below, if some text is offensive to someone, they
> could add it into the filter.
Currently we can't filter text. This is technically an impossible job 
without fixed versions. The text changes constantly. Some might get 
offensive over time, other might get milder. The only thing why image 
filtering is a little bit different is the technical aspect, that images 
once uploaded rarely change it's content. They are like text-modules put 
inside the article and therefore much easier to handle than content itself.

You proposed that we could set up an project to play the role of a 
censor (not in an evil way), so we could experiment with it and to find 
out how people react. I would not support such a project and i would 
refrain from investing time and money into it. It's clear to me that the 
benefits would be eaten up easily. If there was truly an audience that 
enjoyed preselected content from Wikipedia. Then I'm sure we would 
already have commercial pages providing that service for churches, 
institutions and so on. If the possible enjoying audience of such an 
version would be such big, then I'm sure we would have such projects 
already. But it seams to me that such an project would not survive due 
to the massive time spend and effort that needs to be included while the 
paying audience is so minimal. If we implement the image filter, then 
all of our donors would also accept to fund a small but loud minority. 
But if we still support such a project, then we make 
"http://wikipedia.censored.net" a possibility. Since we are the 
providers for the content. Now let churches, institutions, etc. pay 
money for "censored.net" and block "wikipedia.org". I would be the first 
to open this site. Let the Wikipedia-Volunteers do the hard job, use 
their categories, review with little effort for some minor mistakes and 
sell it for money. What an amazing thing to do! Congratulations 
community ;-)
> * Most importantly, that won't affect anything else. Except, probably,
> ~$1M/year of WMF budget for development of censorship software and
> censorship itself, as they will say that they lack of people to censor
> images and that they need employees to do that. Although it would be
> more useful to give that ~$1M/year for access to Wikipedia from
> African countries, I think that it's reasonable price for having
> people who want censorship content. Bottom line is that News Corp will
> pay all of that and much more by giving us free access to Fox News.
It would not be so drastic and would doubt that we would need any 
content from foxy newswash. But the believe that they would pay for our 
issues makes me laugh so hard that I'm in pain. ;-)