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

[Andrew Gray]

On 14 June 2012 18:01, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 14 June 2012 17:22, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Shocking images in [[Nanking Massacre]] are pretty much expected.
>> [[People's Republic of China–Japan relations]] not so much. [[Agent
>> orange]] is a more boarderline case but these things are never easy as
>> [[Wikipedia:LAME#Names]] shows.
>
> Yes, but this is called editorial judgement rather than something that
> can be imposed by filtering. (Although the board and staff claim that

This falls into the trap of presuming there is one approach of
"editorial judgement of acceptability" that is common to all readers,
*and* that it's the same as the editorial judgement currently provided
by our community of editors.

I'm not confident that a) is a reliable assumption - neutrality is a
matter of presenting all sides, and so we can achieve it, while this
sort of editorial judgement is basically binary and so much harder to
equivocate. Even if it is, b) certainly has problems - while our
community strives to be neutral, I doubt anyone would claim it does
not start off with fairly heavy biases, from demography as much as
anything else.

Least surprise is one way to try and get around this problem of not
relying on the community's own judgement in all edge cases; I'm not
sure it's the best one, but I'm not sure leaving it out is any better.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk