Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: The licensing update poll has been tallied. Yes, I am in favor of this change : 13242 (75.8%) No, I am opposed to this change : 1829 (10.5%) I do not have an opinion on this change : 2391 (13.7%) Total ballots cast and certified: 17462 I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. Marco (Cruccone) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:20 AM, Marco Chiesa chiesa.ma...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: The licensing update poll has been tallied. Yes, I am in favor of this change : 13242 (75.8%) No, I am opposed to this change : 1829 (10.5%) I do not have an opinion on this change : 2391 (13.7%) Total ballots cast and certified: 17462 I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. -Robert Rohde ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Licensing resolution
In light of the vote results announced regarding the proposed licensing update, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has unanimously passed the following resolution: Resolved that: Whereas the Wikimedia community, in a project-wide vote, has expressed very strong support for changing the licensing terms of Wikimedia sites, and whereas the Board of Trustees has previously adopted a license update resolution requesting that such a change be made possible, the Board hereby declares its intent to implement these changes. Accordingly, the Wikimedia Foundation exercises its option under Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License to relicense the Wikimedia sites as Massive Multiauthor Collaborations under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, effective June 15, 2009. The Board of Trustees hereby instructs the Executive Director to have all Wikimedia licensing terms updated and terms of use implemented consistent with the proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote? 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the editing community really is! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/21 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk: 2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote? 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the editing community really is! Millions, presumably. The English Wikipedia has nearly 10 million registered users, although a large portion of those won't have 25 edits (and some will be sockpuppets). Once you take the whole Wikimedia movement into account, the number of eligible voters must surely be over a million. A very large portion of those will no longer be involved in the projects, though. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/21 Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk: 2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote? 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the editing community really is! Millions, presumably. The English Wikipedia has nearly 10 million registered users, although a large portion of those won't have 25 edits (and some will be sockpuppets). Once you take the whole Wikimedia movement into account, the number of eligible voters must surely be over a million. A very large portion of those will no longer be involved in the projects, though. I believe there are around 600,000 qualified accounts (roughly half of which from enwiki). If you choose a historically active account at random, there is somewhat less than a 10% chance that any given account will edit in any given month. Which suggests that the pool of people who are qualified and likely to have seen the site notice is around 60,000. If that number is in the right ballpark, then actual participation from qualified people who saw the announcement was perhaps 20-30%. -Robert Rohde PS. Incidentally enwiki has 9.7 M registered accounts, but 70% of these have exactly 0 edits and 90% have less than 5 edits. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
I don't know how many people were eligible to vote in the license migration, but I believe there are currently about 150,000 active editors, if active is defined as a registered user who has made more than five edits in the past month. Either Erik (Moeller or Zachte), or Frank, might be able to confirm that. -Original Message- From: Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 18:47:05 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result 2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote? 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the editing community really is! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 2:14 PM, Sue Gardner susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: I don't know how many people were eligible to vote in the license migration, but I believe there are currently about 150,000 active editors, if active is defined as a registered user who has made more than five edits in the past month. Either Erik (Moeller or Zachte), or Frank, might be able to confirm that. These numbers make sense to me. 10% voter turnout is relatively low when compared to public elections in general. But then again there aren't too many online votes of this size held among volunteers of charitable organizations, so there isn't a lot of direct precedent to compare to. I doubt any of the larger projects ever get to even 10% turnout for their various community discussions, and important decisions are routinely made in the project with far fewer votes then that. --Andrew Whitworth -Original Message- From: Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk Date: Thu, 21 May 2009 18:47:05 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing Listfoundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result 2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Do we have a rough estimate of qualifying voters who didn't vote? 17000 is pretty good, but it occurs to me I have no idea how large the editing community really is! -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing resolution
2009/5/21 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net: In light of the vote results announced regarding the proposed licensing update, the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has unanimously passed the following resolution: Resolved that: Whereas the Wikimedia community, in a project-wide vote, has expressed very strong support for changing the licensing terms of Wikimedia sites, and whereas the Board of Trustees has previously adopted a license update resolution requesting that such a change be made possible, the Board hereby declares its intent to implement these changes. Accordingly, the Wikimedia Foundation exercises its option under Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License to relicense the Wikimedia sites as Massive Multiauthor Collaborations under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, effective June 15, 2009. The Board of Trustees hereby instructs the Executive Director to have all Wikimedia licensing terms updated and terms of use implemented consistent with the proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update Woo-hoo! :-) Once again, a big *thank you* to the licensing committee for administering the voting process. All the volunteers on the committee have been hugely helpful. I want to especially mention Robert Rohde, without whom the result probably wouldn't have been ready last week. The work of the LiCom doesn't end here - we'll now develop a strategy and checklist to update all the relevant licensing terms. There are also a couple of open questions that we should discuss a bit further before implementing the change, in particular, the best process and policies for handling externally created CC-BY-SA content to be imported into our projects. I'll post more on that very soon. This is a big day for free culture. :-) All best, Erik -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing resolution
Erik Moeller wrote: Once again, a big *thank you* to the licensing committee for administering the voting process. All the volunteers on the committee have been hugely helpful. I want to especially mention Robert Rohde, without whom the result probably wouldn't have been ready last week. I would also like to thank the committee, along with SPI, for helping with the vote. And really, there are *a lot* of people who have earned thanks for their efforts in bringing us to this point. At the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman (obviously) along with Benjamin Mako Hill. At Creative Commons, Larry Lessig, Mike Linksvayer, and Diane Peters. Eben Moglen and the Software Freedom Law Center. Of our own staff, Erik himself and Mike Godwin in particular. And by singling out any names here, I know that I must already be neglecting others that I really ought to mention, but I may not personally be aware of the depth of their contribution to the process. So let me conclude by thanking everyone who participated in the process, including especially all of you who voted. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I believe there are around 600,000 qualified accounts (roughly half of which from enwiki). What is your source for that? PS. Incidentally enwiki has 9.7 M registered accounts, but 70% of these have exactly 0 edits and 90% have less than 5 edits. 90% with less than 5 edits means about 1 million with more. I would imagine a sizeable proportion of people with 5 edits have 25. 300,000 eligible enwiki accounts seems small to me. There are (as Sue rightly says) half that many active accounts, and I doubt half of all Wikipedians are still around (back when we had exponential growth of users that might have been the case, but we levelled out a while back). ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/21 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: I believe there are around 600,000 qualified accounts (roughly half of which from enwiki). What is your source for that? PS. Incidentally enwiki has 9.7 M registered accounts, but 70% of these have exactly 0 edits and 90% have less than 5 edits. 90% with less than 5 edits means about 1 million with more. I would imagine a sizeable proportion of people with 5 edits have 25. 300,000 eligible enwiki accounts seems small to me. There are (as Sue rightly says) half that many active accounts, and I doubt half of all Wikipedians are still around (back when we had exponential growth of users that might have been the case, but we levelled out a while back). As of last September, exactly 297467 enwiki accounts had made 20 or more edits. [1] The distribution is compellingly log-log, which implies about 255,000 accounts on enwiki with 25+ edits on that date. Extrapolating the rate of increase forward 6 months gets you to about 300,000. Other analysis generally indicates that scaling enwiki results to the global wiki community generally requires a factor of a little more than 2. (Taking Sue's number at face value, which strikes me as a little high, would imply a factor closer to 3.) Doubling 300,000 is 600,000. Maybe that needs to be higher, e.g. 750,000 or something, but I'm fairly confident it is in the right ballpark. Also, there is a good deal of overcounting with individuals having accounts on multiple wikis. Incidentally, Tim Starling actually generated a list of qualified accounts during the setup process. Assuming he still has it lying around, we could possibly get an exact count. -Robert Rohde [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_frequency/All_registered ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: 2009/5/20 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: The licensing update poll has been tallied. Yes, I am in favor of this change : 13242 (75.8%) No, I am opposed to this change : 1829 (10.5%) I do not have an opinion on this change : 2391 (13.7%) I do want to state for the record that the only reason a no opinion option was included in the vote was to give users an option to not vote explicitly if they didn't feel they could have an informed opinion on such a complex issue, so that they wouldn't feel compelled to make one up. In other words, it was a measure intended to increase the quality of the yes/no votes. But I don't think these neutral votes should be given greater weight than the people who expressed no opinion by not voting. In other words, I consider this for all intents and purposes an 88%/12% result (it was also stated in the proposal that votes that express a preference would be the basis of any decision). I say this because that is important if people want to view it through the lens of our traditional standards of rough consensus. :-) Which way do neutral votes count on RfA? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org Which way do neutral votes count on RfA? 1) at which project (and please dont use enwiki abbreviations) 2) does it matter? :) eia ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:12 PM, effe iets anders effeietsand...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org Which way do neutral votes count on RfA? 1) at which project (and please dont use enwiki abbreviations) The important one (and why not). Ah, meta? :) - seriously, i don't see why only to consider enwiki methods. Sure, most voters came from there, but this is an interwiki decision, where interwiki measures would make more sense. But well, not that it matters anyway, these things should be decided /beforehand/ not afterwards. 2) does it matter? :) Just wondering. I see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_bureaucratship/Riana/Bureaucrat_discussionthat they seem to be excluded from the %. well, since those are about people, and this isn't, I dont see any relevance :P Usually the two categories are treated differently. -- eia ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:19 PM, effe iets anders effeietsand...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/5/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:12 PM, effe iets anders effeietsand...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org Which way do neutral votes count on RfA? 1) at which project (and please dont use enwiki abbreviations) The important one (and why not). Ah, meta? :) - seriously, i don't see why only to consider enwiki methods. Sure, most voters came from there, but this is an interwiki decision, where interwiki measures would make more sense. In my opinion it shouldn't have ever been put to a vote in the first place, so I guess I agree with you. But well, not that it matters anyway, these things should be decided /beforehand/ not afterwards. 50% was decided beforehand as the threshold for sending to the board. 2) does it matter? :) Just wondering. I see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_bureaucratship/Riana/Bureaucrat_discussionthat they seem to be excluded from the %. well, since those are about people, and this isn't, I dont see any relevance :P Whatever. I didn't ask the question for your benefit. Usually the two categories are treated differently. As they should be. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:12 PM, effe iets anders effeietsand...@gmail.comwrote: 2009/5/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org Which way do neutral votes count on RfA? 1) at which project (and please dont use enwiki abbreviations) The important one (and why not). 2) does it matter? :) Just wondering. I see from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_bureaucratship/Riana/Bureaucrat_discussionthat they seem to be excluded from the %. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
phoebe ayers wrote: On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:20 AM, Marco Chiesa chiesa.ma...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com wrote: The licensing update poll has been tallied. Yes, I am in favor of this change : 13242 (75.8%) No, I am opposed to this change : 1829 (10.5%) I do not have an opinion on this change : 2391 (13.7%) Total ballots cast and certified: 17462 I think this is a very good result, in particular the turnout looks great to me! Congratulations to all who have worked hard to get to it, and I hope there will be a board resolution soon. As was commented on elsewhere, the 2008 Board Election only had 3019 votes, which also suggests the turnout this time was remarkable. Yes -- I think this is definitely the largest group of Wikimedians to ever collectively express an opinion on anything! It'd be worth figuring out why the vote was successful, if possible (long period of voting? ubiquitous sitenotices? Important topic? Lots of outside interest?) Deliberately low threshold for eligibility. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/22 Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net: Deliberately low threshold for eligibility. Do we have any statistics for what the turnout was among different demographics? In particular, do we know how many people voted that wouldn't have been eligible under the board election suffrage rules? If it isn't many then that can't be the explanation. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:43 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Yes -- I think this is definitely the largest group of Wikimedians to ever collectively express an opinion on anything! It'd be worth figuring out why the vote was successful, if possible (long period of voting? ubiquitous sitenotices? Important topic? Lots of outside interest?) I'm going to speculate and suggest ease of decision making, perhaps even polarizing topic. Rank the following people that you've never met and know nothing about from 1 to 12 is a much more intense task compared to You want CC-BY-SA instead of GFDL? Yes, no, or maybe? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing update vote result
2009/5/22 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 7:43 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: Yes -- I think this is definitely the largest group of Wikimedians to ever collectively express an opinion on anything! It'd be worth figuring out why the vote was successful, if possible (long period of voting? ubiquitous sitenotices? Important topic? Lots of outside interest?) I'm going to speculate and suggest ease of decision making, perhaps even polarizing topic. Rank the following people that you've never met and know nothing about from 1 to 12 is a much more intense task compared to You want CC-BY-SA instead of GFDL? Yes, no, or maybe? You're probably on to something there. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Proposals re : sexual content on wikimedia
Hi all, I saw this news item today; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8061979.stm and felt that it was tangentially related to the discussions on this list concerning sexual content on wikimedia - it's prompted me to make this reply anywhoo (both the story and the comments are worth reading, and I feel they deal with the 'baby' and 'bathwater' aspects reasonably well). In a bid to avoid Birgitte's ignore list (the ignominy ! ;-) I thought I'd respond to a few further comments and detail my proposals / reasoning for good ways forward; ( see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sexual_content for details on my proposals ) Firstly, the issue of whether or not Wikimedia should try and meet the needs of a market, for example schools, who prefer to not display images of sexual activity, for me is a somewhat moot - the issue is more that wikimedia's policies in this area are not the result of careful thought, we're really more just ended up in the status quo. It seems sensible to me to closely examine whether or not we like that status quo, and whether or not there are policies and practicies on various projects which should be improved. I think we're doing some things a bit wrong, and should want to improve, as oppose to inviting someone else to do them better. Perhaps my slightly dull, but canonical, example of this is that I don't think it's necessary for commons to host pictures of topless women, taken at the beach, without their permission - this sort of user genearted content is a net detriment to the project in my view. I'd be interested to hear if anyone disputes this specific asasertion. My 'proposal 1' is that sexual content be restricted from userspace - I concur with Jimbo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Walesdiff=prevoldid=284543731) that an image of shaven genitalia is inappropriate on a userpage My 'proposal 2' in the linked page is broadly synonymous with the technical implementation discussed by Brion previously - the addition of some sort of soft 'opt in' / age verification requirement seems a bit of a no-brainer to me - I had an interesting chat recently with someone who was insistent that the lack of such means Wikimedia is technically breaking UK and Australian law - I have no idea as to the veracity of this (or whether it matters!) - but am interested in the ideas and opinions of those more cluey in this area. My 'proposal 3' suggests that we need to apply more rigour in checking the model releases and licensing - basically we're just too easy to game at the moment, and various mischievous souls have delighted in leading various communities up garden paths in the past - what's interesting is some community's willingness to be somewhat complicit in this process (the 'we must assume good faith, so yeah - this image is clearly fine' problem - the burden of evidence is all wrong in my book). Those antipodeans who've heard be chat about this at Wiki Wed. here in Sydney may be interested to hear that there is some follow up interest in this topic in general, and I may be boring more folk on this subject with a nattily written post on a Fairfax blog - I'm particularly keen at the moment to try and discern whether or not it's possible to move forward in any way on this issue, or whether or not we're sort of stuck in the bed we've made to date all thoughts and ideas most welcome... :-) cheers, Peter PM. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Proposals re : sexual content on wikimedia
PM, while I respect your opinions, I must express my strong disagreement with most of them. Your first idea is restricting sexual content from userspace. This would encroach on personal freedom, because why shouldn't people be able to post whatever they want in their personal space? The second is a soft opt in. Why would we want to make another hoop for people to jump through? It would appear that such a system would hinder complete useability. Also, we don't follow UK or Australian law. When it comes to model releases, I have no objections whenever a person can be distinguished from the photograph. From: private musings thepmacco...@gmail.com To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2009 7:50:09 PM Subject: [Foundation-l] Proposals re : sexual content on wikimedia Hi all, I saw this news item today; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8061979.stm and felt that it was tangentially related to the discussions on this list concerning sexual content on wikimedia - it's prompted me to make this reply anywhoo (both the story and the comments are worth reading, and I feel they deal with the 'baby' and 'bathwater' aspects reasonably well). In a bid to avoid Birgitte's ignore list (the ignominy ! ;-) I thought I'd respond to a few further comments and detail my proposals / reasoning for good ways forward; ( see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Sexual_content for details on my proposals ) Firstly, the issue of whether or not Wikimedia should try and meet the needs of a market, for example schools, who prefer to not display images of sexual activity, for me is a somewhat moot - the issue is more that wikimedia's policies in this area are not the result of careful thought, we're really more just ended up in the status quo. It seems sensible to me to closely examine whether or not we like that status quo, and whether or not there are policies and practicies on various projects which should be improved. I think we're doing some things a bit wrong, and should want to improve, as oppose to inviting someone else to do them better. Perhaps my slightly dull, but canonical, example of this is that I don't think it's necessary for commons to host pictures of topless women, taken at the beach, without their permission - this sort of user genearted content is a net detriment to the project in my view. I'd be interested to hear if anyone disputes this specific asasertion. My 'proposal 1' is that sexual content be restricted from userspace - I concur with Jimbo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Walesdiff=prevoldid=284543731) that an image of shaven genitalia is inappropriate on a userpage My 'proposal 2' in the linked page is broadly synonymous with the technical implementation discussed by Brion previously - the addition of some sort of soft 'opt in' / age verification requirement seems a bit of a no-brainer to me - I had an interesting chat recently with someone who was insistent that the lack of such means Wikimedia is technically breaking UK and Australian law - I have no idea as to the veracity of this (or whether it matters!) - but am interested in the ideas and opinions of those more cluey in this area. My 'proposal 3' suggests that we need to apply more rigour in checking the model releases and licensing - basically we're just too easy to game at the moment, and various mischievous souls have delighted in leading various communities up garden paths in the past - what's interesting is some community's willingness to be somewhat complicit in this process (the 'we must assume good faith, so yeah - this image is clearly fine' problem - the burden of evidence is all wrong in my book). Those antipodeans who've heard be chat about this at Wiki Wed. here in Sydney may be interested to hear that there is some follow up interest in this topic in general, and I may be boring more folk on this subject with a nattily written post on a Fairfax blog - I'm particularly keen at the moment to try and discern whether or not it's possible to move forward in any way on this issue, or whether or not we're sort of stuck in the bed we've made to date all thoughts and ideas most welcome... :-) cheers, Peter PM. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
