I should state that I haven't fully kept up to date on this thread; I
managed to give myself a concussion this week and have been limiting the
amount of time spent on activities that are mentally intensive. I decided
to pop in and check on how it was going though, and after seeing Russavia's
friendly there-are-no-problems-with-commons-culture tone in his last post,
I figured I'd pop in and ask a question of Russavia (which he refused to
answer on-wiki.)
Russavia: one of your recent comments at a deletion discussion (here: [1])
looks an awful lot like you think that labelling a group of identifiable,
living people as engaged in prostitution related activities with no
evidence other than their location is perfectly acceptable and not a
violation of [[COM:IDENT]] or the board BLP resolution. To me, labelling a
group of identifiable, living people as engaged in prostitution related
activities with no evidence other than their location is a strong violation
of both COM:IDENT, and the board's BLP resolution. Most of the other
Wikimedians I've shown your comment to have interpreted it in the same way
I have. (You said that labelling a group of identifiable, living people as
engaged in prostitution related activities was "apt" because they were in
an area known to have a lot of sex work. Given my understanding of the
word, that means you thought it was appropriate/suitable - "apt" is
definitely not a word I'd use to describe a BLP violation. Just in case
I'd misunderstood what the word meant, I took a look at MW and the OED,
both of which indicated that no,I really hadnt.)
a) Have I accurately interpreted your comment? If I haven't, would you
mind clarifying your intent as you refused to do on-wiki so those confused
about what you meant are able to understand what you meant?
b) Do you believe that walking away from an active on-wiki discussion
refusing to explain what you meant by a comment some took as highly
questionable is in line with what should be expected of sysops on major
projects?
Here's the comment in question reproduced for those who don't want to click
through:
"Carrer de Sant Ramon in El Raval, Barcelona is notorious for being one of
the worst places in Barcelona for street prostitution, and this is also
acknowledged in local Catalan press. The uploader has done the right thing
in applying cover to the eyes of the people, and no individual person is
being "named" as a prostitute, but given that this street is known for
daylight prostitution, the name of the file and its description is apt.
However, prostitutes in the street do not generally like their photographs
to be taken. I am not opining delete on the basis of the nomination but
rather for very different reasons. Inline
withCommons:Country_specific_consent_requirements, in Spain one requires
permission to both take a photograph and publish the photograph when it is
taken in a public place, and there is no evidence that this was obtained by
the uploader. So on that basis, and that basis alone, it's a firm delete."
-----
Kevin Gorman
(Since I cut/pasted Russavia's comment directly, one of the links to
Youtube he posted may attach to this email, and I don't currently see the
right button to turn that off.)
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 10:58 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 10:03 PM, John Mark Vandenberg
<jayvdb(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
We're getting a long way off topic of the
still frame on MOTD, but I
agree, and wish that the WMF would make this a priority for their
multimedia and search team.
Many improvements have been suggested by the community, and both sides
of the fence have even agreed on some of them, such as clustered
search results:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Brainstorming#Cluster…
First, as general background, WMF recently started migrating its
search infrastructure over to ElasticSearch. See:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Search
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch
The new search is available on Commons as a BetaFeature. It's worth
looking at search results that are viewed as problematic through the
new search and compare. For example, the results for "Asian" are
markedly different in the new search.
I would caution against a simplistic characterization of technology as
a solution for what's inherently a complex socio-technical problem.
That was a core issue with the image filter proposal and it's a
similar issue here. If people insist on uploading pictures of
masturbation with toothbrushes, those pictures will come up in
searches. If we insist on not having a distinction between explicit
and non-explicit materials in file metadata, search results won't have
it either. We can point the finger at technology because that's easy,
but it's not magical pixie dust.
To get a feel for ElasticSearch's capabilities, please see the help
page above, as well as the tech talk that Nik gave earlier today on
the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FubXExbAvOA
Capabilities that exist today with the new search include
template-based "boosting" of results, a feature that's already enabled
on Commons and which will boost quality content in search results:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Cirrussearch-boos…
ElasticSearch has support for faceting (see
http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/searc…
), which might come in handy for creating a breakdown of search
results.
However, keep in mind that unless you collapse each facet by default,
you're still going to show explicit thumbs -- and collapsing results
by default could compromise usability to an unacceptable degree for
the common use case. The more complex suggestions that include taking
the full category tree into account also seem fairly complex/expensive
(ElasticSearch has no awareness of the actual category tree structure,
which is a complex structure to traverse) and a faceted search that
only operates on the specific categories associated with a given file
might not be very useful due to the high degree of granularity that
exists in the category structure.
I'd encourage Nik and Chad (search engineers) to weigh in here & on
the bug as they see fit, as well as correct me if I'm misrepresenting
anything in the above.
Cheers,
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
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