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

[Tom Morris]

On Saturday, 16 June 2012 at 20:21, Tobias Oelgarte wrote:
> That means they already found a solution to their problem that includes
> the whole web at once. As you might have noticed it isn't perfect. I
> guess that it could be easily improved over time. But the image filter
> had an different goal. It wouldn't help the schools, since the content
> is still accessible. But why we discuss about schools and children all
> the time and speak about it as a net nanny?


Don't you get it? An image filter you can trivially opt-out of by clicking the big button labelled "show image" is a perfect way of preventing children from getting to naughty pictures…

Seriously though, I'm slightly surprised that commercial censorware providers haven't bothered to add the nudey stuff from Commons. Pay a few bored minimum wage people to go through and find all the categories with the naughty stuff and stick all those images in their filter. It'd only take a few hours, given the extensive work already done by the Commons community neatly sorting things into categories with names like "Nude works including Muppets" and "Suggestive use of feathers" etc.

It's almost as if the censorware manufacturers are selling products to people who don't know any better that are ineffective and serve to give piece-of-mind placebo to people in place of effective access control. Oh, wait, that would be the inner cynic speaking.  

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