David: when I started this discussion, there was literally nothing but crickets on Commons. Since starting this discussion prompted a discussion on Commons to actually start, yes, I have engaged in it. Writing up replies to posts takes time and I happened to send my reply to this thread before replying to Commons, and replied to Commons within five minutes of your post going out (and spent the time between sending my message here and posting to Commons, er, formulating replies to people on Commons and talking with another person over chat about the situation.)
Leigh: I don't want to cover that up, which is why I explicitly support us having the video and other relevant images, and using them in a way that provides educational/editorial value. Yesterday, most viewers couldn't have played the video the still linked to, because it was in a format relatively few browsers support. Context for the image was only provided in 5 languages, whereas we run projects in 287 different languages. For any viewer who didn't speak one of those five languages and who couldn't play the video (and most viewers can't play the video,) the still wouldn't have had the effect of serving as a shocking reminder of the events of the holocaust. It would've just been a grainy black and white stack of corpses decontextualised from any meaning.
To resnip a bit from my last post, 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 UC Berkeley
On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 12:24 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 9 May 2014 20:11, Kevin Gorman kgorman@gmail.com wrote:
Pine: besides the unusually high effect Commons has on other projects
(most
projects are essentially forced to use Commons,) Commons' lack of a local
Have you raised this in response to the actual, and extensive, discussion on Talk:Main Page? e.g., in response to the person who put it there?
Oh, I see you haven't - you've just said "I'm taking this elsewhere."
You probably should address his substantive points directly. There are quite a few, and I found them quite convincing.
- d.
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