On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 9:46 AM, Pete Forsyth <peteforsyth(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
Commons is fundamentally different from Google, Flickr and other image
repositories in that it doesn't have safe search, neither as default nor as
an option.
If you enter "human male", "forefinger", "Asian",
"Caucasian", or "Black"
as search terms in –
1.
Google Images
http://images.google.com/
2.
Flickr
https://www.flickr.com/
3.
Wikipedia Multimedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=&f…
– the results are strikingly different, with the Wikimedia image repository
the only one returning NSFW results (this applies even if you switch Google
Safe Search off).
You can philosophically debate, applaud or excoriate that fact, as many
have done, but it remains a fact.