[Foundation-l] Blog from Sue about censorship, editorial judgement, and image filters

[Theo10011]

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 11:44 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 30 September 2011 18:24, Theo10011 <de10011 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Bishakha, call it editorial-content, call it censorship or any other
> > euphemism - at the heart of it, it is deciding what someone gets to see
> and
> > what not.
>
> That is just completely untrue. The image filter will allow people to
> choose what to see and what not to see. We won't be making the
> decisions...
>

Actually, "we" will be. Depending upon how such a system is implemented, it
will use the editors or categories to find out which images go where and
what is offensive. If you look at the mock-ups used in the referendum
page[1][2], you will see switchable content filters based on categories or
something similar. What picture goes under which content tab, would probably
be decided by the categories.

People won't get to pick what goes under 'sexual content' or 'other
controversial content' - for all we know, those 2 filters can occupy 90% of
commons. I never got the impression that viewers would get a choice to pick
and choose every single image they deem offensive, which brings the
inevitable conundrum what is offensive to you, might not be for me.

Then, there also Kim's challenge to break such a filtering system.

Theo

[1]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PIF-Proposal-Workflow-Anon-FromNav-Step2.png
[2]
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PIF-Proposal-Workflow-Anon-FromNav-Step3.png