[Wikimedia-l] Board resolution on personal image hiding feature

[MZMcBride]

Bishakha Datta wrote:
> At its 11 July board meeting, the Board of Trustees passed a resolution
> rescinding its previous direction to implement the personal image hiding
> feature.
> 
> The resolution is online at
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:_Personal_Image_Hiding_Feature

Well, all right. I suppose this gives you all some legitimacy (your
resolution won't be flatly ignored) and allows Sue/the Wikimedia Foundation
to focus on more pressing matters. Good job.

At the moment, I'm mostly of the mind that this is something that outside
groups need to focus on themselves. When you look at the individual problems
presented here (pornography in search results at school or work, articles
with graphic imagery, etc.), there's simply no good answer. Particular
problems require particular solutions. That's been one of the reasons that
creating a technical tool has been so difficult. There was never any clear
problem, there were a thousand mostly clear problems, each with different
slightly different solutions and complexities.

If people are truly pining for a School-Safe Wikipedia, there's a small
business waiting to be born, isn't there? There are already similar
projects, e.g., <http://schools-wikipedia.org/>.

The Wikimedia Foundation should focus its resources on helping the community
develop quality, free educational content. If someone wants to create
Porn-Free Wikipedia or School-Safe Wikipedia or whatever else, I think we
shouldn't encourage or discourage it. The line should be: the content is
under a free license; do what you want with it.

That also means exercising reasonable and mature editorial judgment on the
various Wikimedia wikis. This is something that Wikimedians are often
terrible at. It'd be good if there were a way to address this.

> We are working on a Q&A document that will be published after Wikimania.

I hope you all include "What has been learned from this?" :-)  Lots of good
lessons for all three sides here, I think (staff, Board, and community).

MZMcBride