[Foundation-l] Controversial content software status

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 1:00 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi MZ and all --
>
> Project development was put on hold over the winter in favor of more
> pressing priorities, with the agreement of the Board. There is
> currently an open proposal on the table for the Board to vote on
> whether to continue with our original request for an image hiding
> feature; and the ED will take direction from the Board on the matter.
> We have put that vote off however due to the more time-sensitive and
> generally all-consuming financial discussions of the past couple of
> months. I haven't reported on it one way or the other because the
> timeline for a revote hasn't yet been set.
>
> So, yeah, things are on hold essentially because there are more urgent
> things to do, and because given the rather extraordinary scale of the
> debate and all of the controversy, serious reconsideration of our
> original proposal has been requested.
>
> It seems clear however that regardless, there is both much technical
> and social work that needs to be done around controversial content
> that has nothing to do with image hiding, e.g. to improve Commons
> search, rigorously get model releases, etc. etc.; and also that for
> any particular technical proposal around image hiding there would be
> many, many (perhaps insuperable) issues and details to work out.
>
> I'd like to point out here that the other points addressed in both of
> the controversial content resolutions
> (
> http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Images_of_identifiable_people
> and http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content),
> though much less controversial, are also quite important!
>
>

Thanks, Phoebe. But think about it – if we're not doing the image filter,
why should the community bother to do anything else you've "urged" in these
resolutions? None of it has been happening so far. Model releases? Consent
of people depicted in private settings? All I see, almost one year after
these Board Resolutions were put up, is business as usual, with people
happy to muddle along, Flickrwashing as before. Who cares if the account
disappears off Flickr a week later?

As for POLA, the "principle of least astonishment" that the Board supported
in its controversial content resolution, it may be enough to say
that User:Fæ was threatened with removal of his filemover rights in Commons
just the other day, by an admin who objected to his "pushing POLA on
Commons". To state this clearly: this is a Wikimedia UK director being
threatened with having his filemover rights removed by a Commons admin,
because he was seen to be doing something that the Wikimedia Foundation
board had endorsed. Even in Wikipedia there are many who say that the
Board's resolutions are irrelevant, because the community simply does not
agree with them.

I am sorry to say that unless you are prepared to put your foot down, and
represent the tens of thousands of people who expressed their views in the
(admittedly suboptimal) referendum, you risk becoming an irrelevancy – in
exactly the same way that doctors are irrelevant in an asylum where it's
the inmates who call the shots, and the doctors are only kept on for show,
to keep the public money coming in.

Wikimedia critics like Greg Kohs confidently claimed over a year ago that
nothing would ever come of the Harris study, that any proposed action that
would bring Wikimedia in line with all the other top websites like Google,
YouTube and Flickr would be delayed, postponed and watered down until
finally, hopefully, everybody would have forgotten about it. It is
beginning to look like he may yet be proved right ... and that everybody,
from Robert Harris to all the various volunteers who made a good-faith
effort to come up with a system that might work, wasted their time.

Andreas