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

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Wed, Jun 20, 2012 at 6:06 AM, Todd Allen <toddmallen at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, actually, along with several other educational ones, some with
> children's games, her school website, etc. The chances that she would
> randomly stumble across a sexual image on Wikipedia are -vanishingly-
> slim, ...


There is another aspect to this, which is that Wikipedia presently gives
undue weight to the weird, bizarre and even the completely made-up. To give
an example: every kid will look up the word fuck at some point in their
lives. Wikipedia offers, at the bottom of that article, the sexual slang
template

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Sexual_slang

with links to (partly illustrated) articles on a whole slew of weird and
obscure practices, while missing out many of the slang terms ordinary
people actually use in the bedroom. Basically, it's urban dictionary,
written for the lulz, rather than sex education.

Even the article on the humble gel bracelet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gel_bracelet

contains more about a sexual urban legend than anything else, and it too
comes with a template offering helpful links to Wikipedia's bizarre world
of sex.

Larry recently illustrated another way in which kids can come across
Wikimedia's wealth of sexual media:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE4Z9qunAc4

As Seth Finkelstein pointed out the other day, there is opposition to
pornography both from the right, on a family values basis, and from the
left, from feminists countering male bias. These are quite separate, but
equally valid concerns.

It's not for nothing for example that Anita Sarkeesian's article was
vandalised with porn. Male-fantasy porn expresses male dominance; in this
case, it was used to emphatically reassert that dominance, because
Sarkeesian had threatened it. It's as symbolic as the babe calendar on the
office wall: it signals that women don't have much to say in that office,
and can be greeted with cat calls or put-downs.

I am not against pornography per se. I just wish that if the projects have
it, they'd handle it responsibly, the way everybody else does quite
naturally. That means with respect for subject privacy, gender issues,
child protection issues, and so forth. Just be professional about it and
follow best practice.

Andreas