On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 1:39 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 9:05 AM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
The point of I'm trying to make in this discussion is, we
do a lot more good by focusing on what's working, and then expanding on
that, than we do by getting all accusatory about the things that are
*not*
working.
Think of a surgeon who's done thousands of successful routine operations. But every once in a while, he does a gastric bypass, and those patients more often than not end up harmed.
It isn't appropriate in such a case to "focus on what's working".
(And such accusations often seem to be accompanied by an unjustified assumption that the bad somehow outweighs the good.)
The question isn't whether the bad outweighs the good.
Andreas,
I agree with your more sophisticated concerns about what is going on. However, I think it's really important to put them in context. If Wikimedia Commons had existed in 1985, this would be a very compelling line of criticism. But in 2014, the same kind of issues -- occasionally encountering shockingly inappropriate images on occasion -- happens whether you are using Wikimedia Commons, Google search, Flickr, Instagram, or any number of other sites -- not to mention spam that arrives unbidden in your email box. If there are studies that quantify how often this happens in different contexts, I'm not aware of them (and would be very happy to learn about them). Until we can look at that kind of study, I refuse to accept as a premise that Commons is categorically worse than other broad collections of media on the Internet.
This is a problem to be addressed, yes. And it is a problem that the Commons community works to address (at least in incremental fashion) every single day. But in my opinion, it is not a problem to panic about.
Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]]