FWIW, the still caught my eye (uncommon for the media section of the page) and I read the caption, which does give context.
The main product of Buchenwald and other camps was death. Why do we want to cover that up? I saw nothing wrong with it, just as there was nothing wrong with all the photographs of the dead I saw in school hallways as part of Holocaust remembrances.
Offensive is gore for the sake of gore. Obviously, this is not the case here.
Date: Fri, 9 May 2014 12:11:49 -0700 From: kgorman@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Commons' frontpage probably shouldn't prominently feature a decontextualised stack of corpses.
Pine: besides the unusually high effect Commons has on other projects (most projects are essentially forced to use Commons,) Commons' lack of a local canvassing policy, and the general unenforceability of canvassing policies on mailing lists anyway, when a local project has a low population of active editors and is pretty consistently making poor decisions that impact all projects, I see absolutely nothing wrong with raising the discussion at a higher-than-local level, and don't think that raising a discussion at a higher-than-local level needs to be done in a neutral fashion. I think that Commons' not uncommonly acts in a way that is actively detrimental to every other project (and a way that is certainly actively detrimental to building relationships with edu and GLAM institutions,) and given that there's not a large local population on Commons, think a non-neutral posting to a broader audience is absolutely appropriate. Discussion of issues with the Acehnese Wikipedia years ago wasn't confined to the Acehnese Wikipedia, and in recent years issues with the Kazakh Wikipedia and at least a couple of other projects have been brought up on a meta level as well. (The fact that the decision to put a piece of content like this on Common's frontpage was made by *two people* highlights an issue as well..)
I'm not upset about the fact that we have a video of the aftermath of the liberation of Buchenwald on Commons - if we didn't, I'd go find one and upload it. It's an event (and a video) of enormous historic significance, and not one that should ever be forgotten. I'm not even opposed to featuring it on Commons' frontpage - in a way that adheres to the principle of least astonishment and provides viewers with context. That's not what was done here. A still image featuring a pile of corpses was put on Commons' frontpage with any context whatsoever only provided for viewers of five languages - and we run projects in 287 different languages. More than that, since Commons only supports open video formats, a sizable majority of people who use Wikimedia projects are literally incapable of actually playing the video in question. Is there enough journalistic or educational value in displaying a still photo of a pile of corpses that links to a video that cannot be played by most people that provides after the fact context in only 5 of the 287 languages we run projects in to justify putting it on Commons front page? I'm gonna go with no.
FWIW: I would explicitly support featuring this video (or an article about Buchenwald, etc,) albeit with a different freezeframe and appropriate context provided, on the frontpage of the English Wikipedia or any other project where it was actually possible to provide appropriate context to the viewership of the project. ENWP's article about Buchenwald - quite rightly - contains numerous images more graphic than the one that was on Commons front page yesterday. They add significant educational value to the article - and they also only appear past the lede of the article, at a point when anyone reading the article will be fully aware what the article is about and will have intentionally sought the article out - rather than, say, going to Commons to look up an image of a horse and being confronted with a freezeframe of a stack of bodies from a video your browser cannot play with context provided only in languages you do not speak.
Kevin Gorman Wikipedian-in-Residence American Cultures Program UC Berkeley
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:30 PM, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com wrote:
See the comment by Pristurus< https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pristurus%3E at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page#Dead_bodies.3F
Regards, Jee
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 10:57 PM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Jeevan Jose jkadavoor@gmail.com
wrote:
Already answered on the talk page by the editor who had chosen it.
Comment
there if you really want to help us. Continue the comments here if
other
interests. ;)
Regards, Jee
Ah, thanks. Amazing how handy links are. I was a little surprised to see that even on that talkpage, you asked people to move the discussion to yet a different page. I asked that question because a debate on the merits might be somewhat moot if the still was selected randomly or by software, it's interesting to see that it wasn't.
In any case, Pristurus has a good point and one that it would be hard to craft a policy around. Least astonishment is a useful principle, but it doesn't beat out journalistic and/or educational value. Newspapers, magazines, textbooks and other sources of educational material often pick striking images of tragic or shocking circumstances. The point is precisely to draw attention, to disrupt the consciousness of the viewer so that the meaning behind the image and any accompanying material sinks in and the message is imparted strongly. Good sources of knowledge do this rarely but well; shock sites do it constantly and for no particular reason.
Many Pulitzer prize winning photographs feature dead people, people who have been shot, dismembered, even people in the midst of burning alive. They win prizes because they have extraordinary communicative power and meaningfully illustrate very important subjects. Would anyone truly argue that such images should never be used on the main page of any project? _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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