On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
I've never heard "Principle of Least Astonishment" used this way. I've only heard it used in the context of software design- specifically user experience- and never to describe content. WP seems to agree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment Certain terms seem to have special significance in the WP community; is this one of those cases?
Yes -- although I don't think it's been linked in this discussion, I'm pretty sure the resolution Kevin is referring to is this one: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Controversial_content
Two comments on that:
- It does not have specific requirements of the community that must be complied with; rather, it makes suggestions of stuff to keep in mind, which have certainly been much discussed since the passage of the resolution in 2011; - Beyond the issues related to applying a principle of software design to the world of editorial judgment, this resolution has itself been the topic of some controversy in the Wikimedia movement. But not, as far as I'm aware, from the Commons community specifically; as I understand it, it was more a matter of the German Wikipedia community rebelling at the notion of a software feature designed to suppress (for instance) images depicting nudity from the default view (or even as an opt-in feature, since that would require tagging certain images in a way that might support entities outside Wikimedia to apply censorship.)
FWIW, I'm not taken aback by words like "fuck," but in my experience
it always undermines serious arguments that it is used in.
Agreed. Especially in a discussion of meeting cultural expectations, this seems like a very strange and provocative choice of words.
Pete