[Wikimedia-l] Who invoked "principle of least surprise" for the image filter?

[Tom Morris]

On 13 June 2012 22:02, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 13 June 2012 21:56, Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Earliest I have it on a Wikimedia list is from WikiEn-L on 2/11/08 from Ian
>> Woollard (written as principle of least surprise), in the context of a
>> Muhammad images thread started by Jimbo -- but my logs only go back to the
>> summer of 07.
>
>
> Bingo - and he specifically invoked it to "minimise offence".
>

Sure, but it also applies to getting back what you expect.

A male heterosexual friend of mine typed in the word "Boobs" into
Commons search engine a while back and came back with the page "Boobs
on Bikes". It's not a matter of minimising offence, it's simply that
if you type in one thing and get something else and rather surprising,
that's a problem.

That a subset of that surprise happens to be involve people getting
offended doesn't mean that avoiding unnecessary surprise isn't a
laudable goal.

There's surprise in the "reading a book and learning something new"
sense, then there is surprise in the "being told that the book is on
this shelf, but instead it's on a different shelf" sense. The two are
rather different, and I fear some conflation is going on.

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>