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

[Tom Morris]

On Monday, 18 June 2012 at 02:44, Tobias Oelgarte wrote:

> Every stupid bot could do this. There is no "running out of the box"
> solution at the moment, but the effort to set up something like this
> would be minimal compared to anything else.
> 
> I would say that Citizendium failed because they did no automatic
> updating. What i have in mind is delayed mirror with update control. It
> is not meant to be edited by hand. It is a subset of the current content
> selected by the host (one or many users) of the page himself. It is
> essentially a whitelist for Wikipedia that only contains
> selected/checked content. That way a "childrens Wiki" could easily be
> created, by not including any unwanted content, while the effort stays
> minimal. (Not more effort then to create your own book from a list of
> already written articles)

{{sofixit}}


If all the people in favour of filters had spent their time building them rather than arguing about them, we would have had a wide array of different solutions, without any politics or drama.

That said, if people want to filter Wikipedia, a client-side solution rather than a filtered mirror is preferable. If a filtered mirror were to come into existence and become popular, this would mean that people would just filter all of main Wikipedia, which would prevent people from editing Wikipedia. A client-side solution means they are still looking at wikipedia.org just without naughty pics and doesn't interfere with editing. It also reduces the need for any servers. 

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