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

[James Salsman]

>> 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....
>
> The technical solution is a fairly trivial part of the problem; a
> client-side filter could probably be put together in a few days IMO.
>
> The *hard* problem is convincing the "not censored" abusers that it's a
> useful feature for our community.

I'm not so sure about that.  Submitting a patch to
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Bad_Image_List adding a user
preference to add one or more URLs with arbitrary media files to block
instead of using only the centralized list would not require the
approval of the community, just the developers.

Line 17 of http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/BadImage/BadImage.class.php?revision=67467&view=markup
performs image censorship in the centralized, top-down way that the
community already rejected, so a patch to add a distributed filter
list would actually be in line with community decisions.