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

[Todd Allen]

On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 11:31 AM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 June 2012 18:01, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yes, but this is called editorial judgement
>
> No its called censorship. Or at least it will be called censorship by
> enough people to make any debate not worth the effort.
>
>>rather than something that can be imposed by filtering.
>
> True for wikipedia but commons in particular needs some way or another
> to provide more focused search results.
>
>>(Although the board and staff claim that
>> editorial judgement they disagree with must just be trolling is how
>> "principle of least surprise" becomes "we need a filter system".)
>
> Perhaps but I wasn't aware that their opinions were considered to be
> of any significance at this point.
>
> Okey they did block [[user:Beta_M]] but the fact that very much came
> out of the blue shows how little consideration they are given these
> days.
>
>
> The fact remains that anyone who actually wants a filter could
> probably put one together in the form of an Adblock plus filter list
> within a few days. So far the only list I'm aware of is one I put
> together to filter out images of Giant isopods.
>
> --
> geni
>
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If "Principle of least astonishment" means what it normally means,
that being to make sensible UI decisions based upon what your average
user would expect to happen, I'm all for it.

If "Principle of least astonishment" means what it's been co-opted to
mean in this particular case, that people will somehow be "astonished"
to see images of nude humans on human anatomy articles, or depictions
of sex acts on articles about that particular act (though that's
already off kilter, we already fail to use real images on those,
instead preferring poor-quality line drawings), or images of Muhammad
on the Muhammad article, we need a cluebat rather than a filter. Point
those who scream in faux-outrage at finding media depicting
ejaculation on that article, or Muhammad on that article, to the
content disclaimer, tell them that yes, they will actually get an
article on what they specifically look for one for, that yes, we use
multimedia illustrations when we have appropriately licensed and
relevant media, and move on.

Todd Allen