Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On 5/7/2010 5:30 PM, Sue Gardner wrote: On 7 May 2010 16:07, Kim Bruningk...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote: announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject? sincerly, Kim Bruning Kim, the board (and I) have been talking about this for the past couple of days, and we'll continue to talk about it over the next couple of weeks. I think it's fairly likely there will be some kind of statement or statements at the end of that. I'm expecting that over the next few weeks, we all will be paying attention to the conversations on Commons and elsewhere, including here. Just to come back to this point, the board has had some ongoing discussion and will be having a meeting on Tuesday, May 18. I don't know for certain that there will be a statement following that meeting, or whether there will be any particular outcome. I have been informed that some resolutions will be proposed, but I can't predict whether they will be acted upon. Also, did anyone keep a log of the open meeting from Wednesday in the #wikimedia IRC channel? Has that been posted anywhere for others to review? --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
*The roots of the problem* Michael, if the Board is analyzing the issue then it should address the roots of the problem. The fact that recent discussion has taken place around sexual images has the advantage that sex raises a lot of interest from everybody. But from my point of view the issue is grounded in two deeper problems: 1) what happens if the board takes a decision against the community consensus? 2) What happens if the community of a project rejects discussing deeply an issue up to finding a consensus, if they simply vote and applies the majority decision? It seems to me that this is what happened. The community defined a policy without analyzing the issue deeply enough, they didn’t reached a consensus. The board decided that this should addressed and Jimbo actuated. Perhaps this is a caricature of what happened. Surely the real story is far more complex. There was an open debate in the community, the board resolution was more or less ambiguous, and the actions of Jimbo could have been more polite. But I believe that the roots of the problem are more or less there. *Proposed changes in the system* From my point of view the system should be changed in two ways: First Wikimedia Foundation (and its governing body, the Board) should have a mechanism to force the community to debate and search for a consensus. Call it founder’s flag or voice of conscience flag or whatever you want. This is exactly what Jimbo did. He didn’t impose his will although founder’s flag gave him the power to do it. Secondly it should be stated clearly that once a true consensus is reached, the community is sovereign in developing the project. The duty of the Foundation is providing the means to put in practice those decisions. To put a humoristic example, if the law of some state says that the value for number pi is mandatorily 3.2 [1] and the community reaches the consensus that we must explain clearly that the law is wrong, then if necessary the Foundarion must avoid being under the rules of that state. Perhaps some other hygienic measures should be taken. By example perhaps stewards should hold only rights to change user’s status but not to act as sysop of any project. *The case of Images and other “sensible” material* Going to the images with sexual content I think that this should be addresses in a parallel way as other sensible issues like: 1) Images that could offend people of some religion. 2) Images in fair use. 3) Statements in biographies of living people. 4) Statements that can harm the image of products or companies. 5) Naming the articles when the name can carry a biased point of view. By example naming the articles of small towns in Spain using the name imposed by fascist dictatorship instead of the official Spanish name. 6) Contents possibly infringing copyrights. 7) Etc. I think that in those cases we should not change our policies to make happy the affected people but we should create mechanisms to guarantee we are in the safe side: Not publish or publish only the safe official version until we have enough evidences that the sensible material is right, legal, relevant, and has educational purposes. Perhaps we must strength some policies; perhaps to call somebody “thief” in their biography we can’t accept any kind of reference but a reference providing clear evidences that this is true. We also must give to the world clear evidences that we are extremely serious and careful with this issues if we decide to put an image “sensible” there must be clear evidences that we have done our best to guarantee that this image has educational content, that this image is required for the project, that this image accomplish with the law. We can’t make happy everybody; our goal of providing the sum of all human knowledge is above the interest of reaching a broader public or making happy some kind of readers. But we can make everybody agree with us that in “sensible issues” we have strong reasons to say every thing we say and to provide every image we have. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill Message: 9 Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 23:42:44 -0700 From: Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content To: foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 4bee4264.9020...@verizon.net Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed On 5/7/2010 5:30 PM, Sue Gardner wrote: On 7 May 2010 16:07, Kim Bruningk...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote: announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject? sincerly, Kim Bruning Kim, the board (and I) have been talking about this for the past couple of days, and we'll
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On 5/15/2010 4:34 AM, Joan Goma wrote: *The roots of the problem* Michael, if the Board is analyzing the issue then it should address the roots of the problem. We would like to. Roots are sometimes difficult to get at. The fact that recent discussion has taken place around sexual images has the advantage that sex raises a lot of interest from everybody. But from my point of view the issue is grounded in two deeper problems: 1) what happens if the board takes a decision against the community consensus? 2) What happens if the community of a project rejects discussing deeply an issue up to finding a consensus, if they simply vote and applies the majority decision? It seems to me that this is what happened. The community defined a policy without analyzing the issue deeply enough, they didn’t reached a consensus. The board decided that this should addressed and Jimbo actuated. Perhaps this is a caricature of what happened. Surely the real story is far more complex. There was an open debate in the community, the board resolution was more or less ambiguous, and the actions of Jimbo could have been more polite. But I believe that the roots of the problem are more or less there. As you say, it's an oversimplification and it doesn't match the details exactly, but you've done well nevertheless at focusing on essential concepts. I would think that the board is unlikely to make a decision that goes against full community consensus. Reaching or identifying that consensus can be a challenge, though, as I think anyone who's worked on highly debated topics on the wiki knows. Sometimes there's a lack of analysis (or simply attention) that makes an apparent consensus immature, not the consensus that would be reached if everyone was really involved. In many cases, this isn't that big of a problem. Not inventing policies until there's a need for them is usually wise, as it gives people the freedom to be bold and move the work of the projects forward, without worrying about mastering complex rules. But on occasion, this has meant that inadequate care was given to issues of serious concern, as used to be the case with biographies of living people. I don't know that the community has ever really rejected the idea of serious discussion in such a situation. People sometimes argue based on various votes (more like opinion polls, really), but I think most of us understand those are not definitive. The problem is more that it's quite challenging to conduct these discussions, and as a tool, a wiki is better suited to other tasks we do than to this one. *Proposed changes in the system* From my point of view the system should be changed in two ways: First Wikimedia Foundation (and its governing body, the Board) should have a mechanism to force the community to debate and search for a consensus. Call it founder’s flag or voice of conscience flag or whatever you want. This is exactly what Jimbo did. He didn’t impose his will although founder’s flag gave him the power to do it. I think this is a good concept and part of what we are trying to figure out is the right tools for it. I suspect the founder flag was not the right tool for a number of reasons. Now that it has been removed from the equation, how would people suggest that this be set up? Secondly it should be stated clearly that once a true consensus is reached, the community is sovereign in developing the project. The duty of the Foundation is providing the means to put in practice those decisions. To put a humoristic example, if the law of some state says that the value for number pi is mandatorily 3.2 [1] and the community reaches the consensus that we must explain clearly that the law is wrong, then if necessary the Foundarion must avoid being under the rules of that state. To give a more serious example, we have a consensus on Creative Commons licensing, and in fact there was a desire from the community to go in this direction long before we were ultimately able to. I don't imagine that changing unless a better free licensing system arises and the consensus changes. So to answer your suggestion, I'd reiterate my earlier point: I really don't envision the board or the foundation going against anything that amounts to a true consensus in the community. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Hello all, the following sentence from me is surely a very stupid sentense. I apology for it. And thanks for everyone, especially Aphaia and SJ for pointing this out to me. Ting Ting Chen wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. Ting Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? --vvv [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
Thanks for your prompt response, Ting. Fine to see we come to agreement so quickly :) On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Hello all, the following sentence from me is surely a very stupid sentense. I apology for it. And thanks for everyone, especially Aphaia and SJ for pointing this out to me. Ting Ting Chen wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. Ting Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? --vvv [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure ___ 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 -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On 9 May 2010 06:09, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: Bugzilla 982[1] MediaWiki should support ICRA's PICS content labeling. From my understanding without reading much about it, It [ICRA] is ment to be a international or at least a standard for these things which most people seem to abide by (i see it splashed around on a lot of education sites that they are compliant with that standard). This came up in discussion a while ago on WHATWG - PICS is actually dead. Even its creators have given up on it. No-one implements it. As a standard, it's got no backing. So we'd be the first significant organisation to actually take it seriously, and would be reviving it. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 7:09 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: Bugzilla 982[1] MediaWiki should support ICRA's PICS content labeling. From my understanding without reading much about it, It [ICRA] is ment to be a international or at least a standard for these things which most people seem to abide by (i see it splashed around on a lot of education sites that they are compliant with that standard). I'm not sure if it was PICS, but in general I have bad experience with trying to rate the content of my page. I had a website (it still exists, but I cannot reach it any more to change it) that contained a number of biographies. It was sometimes used by middle and high school children for schoolwork. However, trying to rate it, it came out in one of the heaviest categories. Why? As said, it contained biographies. And some were of people who died in a violent way. Thus, the pages were portraying extreme violence. That's when I decided that this rating system wasn't really useful for my site. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 5:39 PM, stevertigo stv...@gmail.com wrote: For one, successful companies can get too big and lose focus: Drifting into wiki priorities instead of encyclopedia priorities, for example, would be the albatross here. That's not to say that we shouldn't further pursue the science of collaborative database interfaces (ie. wikis). -Stevertigo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l And when you're in your bigger room, you might not know what to do. Might start thinking how you got started, working in your little room. ~The White Stripes. -- ~Keegan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 3:58 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: ...snip... Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem important to the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar. The filters can then scale with us. 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-powder-primer-20090901/#ICRA1 -- John Vandenberg Bugzilla 982 - MediaWiki should support ICRA's PICS content labeling[1]. [1]. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=982 -Peachey ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:58:10PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote: Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem important to the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar. The filters can then scale with us. Shall we also make similar proposals favoring the governments of China and Iran re political or religeous content? sincerely, Kim Bruning -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Hoi, In my opinion there are three issues. - there is an influx of material that is best kept private - there is material that some may object to - we can not fulfil our aim because Commons and Wikimedia gets blocked in countries like Iran All the pictures best kept private can be deleted. The material that some may object to can be evaluated for its educational and encyclopaedic value and appropriately categorised or deleted. When we start by addressing the first issue, there are two parts to it. The material itself and the people uploading it. The first is easy, the second is a matter of making sure that the message that this kind of material is not acceptable and should not be imported from Flickr or wherever is absolutely clear. Once this process is under way, we can contact countries like Iran and inform them of the measures that have been taken. It is likely that once this process is well under way, the total block of the Wikimedia domain will be lifted including Commons. This may need action from the WMF and the Farsi community to approach this in the best way. The second issue is more problematic. What one person categorises as nudity, someone else will considered dressed. What one culture considers obscene and puts a fig leave on is considered a classic master piece by later cultures. There will be no easy consensus on this except for the cultural value that many of these objects have. The David of Michelangelo is a nude.. The third issue is one that takes careful handling. It is also something where we have to be careful to set our own agenda and not let creeps like Fox have us rush in needless infighting. Our objective is clear and, it is important to note that it is not Wikipedia that has been blocked in Iran. For this reason it is important not to approach this with knee jerk reactions making them look bad and us look good. We do not serve the government of Iran, we serve the students of Iran and the people looking for information. Thanks, GerardM On 8 May 2010 11:50, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:58:10PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote: Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem important to the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar. The filters can then scale with us. Shall we also make similar proposals favoring the governments of China and Iran re political or religeous content? sincerely, Kim Bruning -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72 ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:58:10PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote: Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem important to the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar. The filters can then scale with us. Shall we also make similar proposals favoring the governments of China and Iran re political or religeous content? No, I don't beat my wife; thanks for asking. :P [[Internet Content Rating Association]] The descriptive vocabulary was drawn up by an international panel and designed to be as neutral and objective as possible. We already do what we can to help Muslims censor themselves. See [[Talk:Muhammad]], faq 4. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 05:30:09PM -0700, Sue Gardner wrote: On 7 May 2010 16:07, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote: announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject? sincerly, ?? ?? ?? ??Kim Bruning Kim, the board (and I) have been talking about this for the past couple of days, and we'll continue to talk about it over the next couple of weeks. I think it's fairly likely there will be some kind of statement or statements at the end of that. I'm expecting that over the next few weeks, we all will be paying attention to the conversations on Commons and elsewhere, including here. That establishes that Jimbo currently has board approval for a scrutinize things more carefully in line with policy approach to commons; but he does not appear to have approval for his current delete everything without discussion approach. This is the same on the community side: Scrutinizing is ok, expedited consultation would be acceptable; but speedy deleting without understanding or taking into account technical, functional, social and political remifications is not. In other words: Jimbo Wales currently appears to be operating on commons in a manner that is outside the frame set by WMF+Communities+Himself. In such a situation, a wise man will stop and negotiate a more appropriate frame before he continues. [1] As of last night, there was still room for negotiation, let's hope cooler heads prevail. :-) sincerely, Kim Bruning [1] It's BRD writ large, essentially. -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 12:09 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: [[Internet Content Rating Association]] Thanks for info. This can be a very good solution! Every user could fill the questionnaire and he or she would see just the content which he or she is willing to see. Some defaults may be applied: Pictures of Muhammad won't be shown in Muslim countries (based on IP), sexually explicit content won't be shown in the most of the world, skeletons won't be shown in China etc. But, every use would be able to define her or his own preferences. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 08:09:34PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:58:10PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote: Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem important to the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar. ?The filters can then scale with us. Shall we also make similar proposals favoring the governments of China and Iran re political or religeous content? No, I don't beat my wife; thanks for asking. :P Sorry, I didn't mean to ask that ;-) [[Internet Content Rating Association]] The descriptive vocabulary was drawn up by an international panel and designed to be as neutral and objective as possible. Ok, so if you want to do censorship, that would be the cleanest possible way to do so. We already do what we can to help Muslims censor themselves. See [[Talk:Muhammad]], faq 4. Dang. All this censorship makes me feel a lot dirtier than the smut it is censoring. sigh sincerely, Kim Bruning -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? --vvv [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:28 PM, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Just in case anyone is seriously considering nixing any project which is not educational, let me point out that Wikisource does have a lot of educational content. e.g. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/EB1911 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/DNB http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Copyright_law Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure or: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catullus_16 (this was/is our 32st most viewed page) perhaps we should also remove the translation from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16 -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. Ting Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? --vvv [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 12:45 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. Excuse me. Wikisource is a library, consisting of any published works that are able to be included as free content. And you think that has no educational value, in and of itself? -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: We already do what we can to help Muslims censor themselves. See [[Talk:Muhammad]], faq 4. Dang. All this censorship makes me feel a lot dirtier than the smut it is censoring. sigh Huh? You're against giving people the choice to self-censor things that they don't want to see? =/ -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Hi, 2010/5/8 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. I beg to disagree about the educational value of WS and Commons. I think that historical documents, wheiher they are texts, images, videos or sounds, have an educational value in themselves, whatever happens on other projects. Ting Regards, Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. What about Wikinews? What educational value does it have? --vvv ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 10:57:52AM -0400, Casey Brown wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:05 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: We already do what we can to help Muslims censor themselves. See [[Talk:Muhammad]], faq 4. Dang. All this censorship makes me feel a lot dirtier than the smut it is censoring. sigh Huh? You're against giving people the choice to self-censor things that they don't want to see? =/ I am not against people abusing drugs, eating badly, self-censoring, etc. It's their mind in their body, and they may use or abuse it as they see fit. This doesn't mean I have to feel good about it, of course :-/ . And I'm not sure I'm obligated to assist them... ;-) sincerely, Kim Bruning -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
True, some people read news sources for titillation by tabloid contents, but most read to learn about current events, which is certainly one important role of education David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:02 AM, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:45 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. What about Wikinews? What educational value does it have? --vvv ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
Hi, On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 7:45 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. Excuse me? -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Disagreed. Those free licensed (or sometimes public domain) content on Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource are not only cited on Wikimedia wikis but on third parties' publifications: from websites to books and magazines. They help to spread a sum of human being knowledge per se, not just repositories to other wikimedia wikis. On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Wikisource is the library of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikibooks, Wikiversity and Wikispecies. The volumes collected in it should be judged with the same principle as the media files in Commons. Ting Victor Vasiliev wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:30 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. I'd like to point out that we already have a project where most information has no educational value. It's called Wikisource and materials there are primarily of artistic value, not educational or information one. Since I basically support the idea that one of Wikimedia Commons aims is to collect as much notable works of art as possible, I view it as a Wikisource for visual arts and music. Should we expect Wikisource to be cleaned up as well? Does Foundation feel need to host such highly disputed works as [1] or [2]? --vvv [1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley's_Lover [2] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fanny_Hill:_Memoirs_of_a_Woman_of_Pleasure ___ 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 -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Hold on, now. These are all awesome educational projects in their own right. And people learn from them every day, just as people learn from museum galleries annotated photo books, books of quotations, and curated collections of primary sources. Commons resolved the are we our own project or are we a technical solution for other projects question early in its evolution. And its great that it became its own community, because its culture has developed some of the best examples of multilingual collaboration we have. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On 8 May 2010 18:35, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Commons, Wikiquote and Wikisource has by themselves no educational value. They gain their educational value in the way that they provide repositories for the other WMF projects. Hold on, now. These are all awesome educational projects in their own right. Indeed. This is a strange position for a WMF board member to espouse. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
H... The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. Time to delete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead I guess... ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
It comes down to the size of the tent. If you want students in Saudi Arabia to be able to use Wikipedia it has to be structured one way. If you want to please gay college students you structure it another way. Really there is no right or wrong; it's a matter of who the resource is going to be available to. We have no power to resolve the cultural differences. We can only be aware and make decisions accordingly. Fred Bauder H... The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. Time to delete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead I guess... ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: It comes down to the size of the tent. If you want students in Saudi Arabia to be able to use Wikipedia it has to be structured one way. If you want to please gay college students you structure it another way. [snip] The deletions performed would not have done even a bit of good making Wikipedia more useful to students in Saudi Arabia. For that we must first start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy. In the access to wikipedia to the general public was inhibited due to a commercially available album cover. I expect that Chinia is still very unhappy with our coverage of human rights and other political and historical subjects. Even in US schools, I can't believe that ones who would inhibit schools over risqué drawings from the 1800s sourced from the US library of congress would suddenly permit access while we still detailed anatomical photographs. (As far as I can tell Jimmy's almost complete cleanup included only one of the almost 300 human penis pictures — is anyone actually proposing we remove all the anatomical images?) It's important to state a goal— it might be arguable to continue deleting educational images if it would cause Wikipedia to be usable in more places... but without a stated goal all we could hope to do is cause the harm without enjoying the benefit. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Is it really our task to worry about the impact certain content might have in a certain culture? There will always be people who are offended by a certain image, phrase or comment, and we cannot possibly accommodate everyone. I would argue that we *should not *consider ourselves educators who's goal is to teach students. Instead, we should think of ourselves as enablers - we create a large repository of (as far as possible) unbiased information that anyone can access and learn from if desired. If someone objects to certain content he or she can choose to discuss it, or otherwise they can refuse to Learn from it. Yet if they refuse, it is not our task to appease them by changing our content. Neither should we strive to be family friendly or politically correct. Sexual and medical images might be entirely inappropriate for children, but they provide valuable information for other groups of people - for example, a gynecologist or a medical student might have a completely non sexual reason to look at certain content. Protecting one group might well mean that we deny valuable data to another. We should also keep in mind that the Internet hosts vast quantities of porn, which is often easier found then looking it up on Wikipedia. Therefor i would argue that a well written article illustrated with (possibly) explicit content can have educational value as well, if only to offset Porn industry style education. Having said all that i would also point out that i wholeheartedly agree we are not a porn repository or a web host for images. We don't need a million pornographic images just to have them; There are only so many places where those images have added value anyway. And equally we should stay well within bounds of the law, and take care that we don't go overboard adding explicit content; Any objectionable content should be handled with care, and has to be added in limited amounts as there is no need to offend people just for the sake of being offensive. But that doesn't mean we should swing the entirely opposite way. Removing old paintings because they contain nudity is, in my eyes, not helping anyone. ~Excirial On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:04 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: It comes down to the size of the tent. If you want students in Saudi Arabia to be able to use Wikipedia it has to be structured one way. If you want to please gay college students you structure it another way. Really there is no right or wrong; it's a matter of who the resource is going to be available to. We have no power to resolve the cultural differences. We can only be aware and make decisions accordingly. Fred Bauder H... The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. Time to delete http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead I guess... ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Excirial wp.excir...@gmail.com wrote: Sexual and medical images might be entirely inappropriate for children, but they provide valuable information for other groups of people - for example, a gynecologist or a medical student might have a completely non sexual reason to look at certain content. Protecting one group might well mean that we deny valuable data to another. So which group is more important? Which is the better answer, to tell families to go elsewhere, or to tell the specialists to go elsewhere? I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
So which group is more important? Which is the better answer, to tell families to go elsewhere, or to tell the specialists to go elsewhere? I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. Those will special interests should have no difficulty creating specialized reference resources. Certainly those who are into pornography have. Fred Bauder ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
2010/5/8 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. -- Tomek Polimerek Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ http://www.ptchem.lodz.pl/en/TomaszGanicz.html ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
2010/5/8 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. All I'm talking about is a children's edition, not gutting En. It could be even more free than it already is, if we chose it to be. Fred ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Why do you believe that there is a need to make a choice between groups of people? We can easily supply all the data - it is up to the user to decide if they want to access it. Anyone active on the internet has the potential to unearth vast amounts of data. There are pro-choice and pro-life sites, there are sites about every religion, There are extremely left and extremely right winged pages. There are pages encouraging suicide, anorexia, bulimia and i can go on and on. Virtually everything related to humanity can be found in the 500 petabytes or so of data we have networked together. If you wish to find something, you can. However, If i am not looking for a page about anorexia or bulimia, *I will not find it*; or at least not on Wikipedia. If i don't want to see a picture on a page, i can block it - See depictions of muhammed for an example. We - or at least i - are not here to appease to a certain group. We are collectively collecting data and transforming that into valid information - as much as we can. We don't withhold or censor information simply because some random group of people doesn't want to see or read it. We should practice biomimicry - we won't evolve into the best source for a certain task, but we evolve into the best source for all tasks combined. And that means that if i search for Penis, i will find an article about it, and that article will likely be illustrated with a diagram or image. Why? Because a image describes the subject better then words can do. If that offends me, i should not be searching in the first place. Take the images on our gangrene http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangrene page. They are in my eyes nauseating and not child friendly, but without them i would not be able to form an understanding of the subject. But the point is - don't search, don't find. Any child can safely search sesame street without ever finding pornographic content on Wikipedia. And frankly, if we are going to appease a certain group or censor ourselves we will head into the direction of Conservapedia, which only offers incomplete information that only little people can use. If anything we should be aware of possible issues. As i said before, there is no reason to offend just to offend, so controversial topics and images should be handled with care. There is no need to have explicit images all over the place, but they should be present in article's which talk about them. ~Excirial On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 11:40 PM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:18 PM, Excirial wp.excir...@gmail.com wrote: Sexual and medical images might be entirely inappropriate for children, but they provide valuable information for other groups of people - for example, a gynecologist or a medical student might have a completely non sexual reason to look at certain content. Protecting one group might well mean that we deny valuable data to another. So which group is more important? Which is the better answer, to tell families to go elsewhere, or to tell the specialists to go elsewhere? I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
Tomek writes: So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. For what it's worth, I personally don't see the issue as one of making Commons (or Wikipedia or any other project) family-friendly. There will always be content that some substantial fraction of the reading population will find offensive. This would be true even if the projects were limited to text. There's also no urgent legal issue driving any changes to Commons -- we don't have reason to believe any category of content we knowingly carry on Commons is definitionally illegal under U.S. law. (Obviously, when if people upload content that is illegal, and we're informed about its presence, we'll remove it -- most likely, volunteers will remove it even before it gets the attention of the Foundation staff.) If we judge Commons content simply on the basis of Does this content serves the mission of the projects? there is no doubt that some content will removed, some offensive content will not be removed, and Commons will no longer be a kind of dumping ground for anything and everything regardless of whether content lacks encyclopedic usefulness. As a side-effect of this, you probably get both (a) a resource that is somewhat more family friendly (because the sheer frequency of merely offensive images is reduced) and (b) a resource that remains essentially uncensored, consistent with its encyclopedic mission. (I use uncensored here to mean not edited merely to avoid offense.) --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: There's also no urgent legal issue driving any changes to Commons -- we don't have reason to believe any category of content we knowingly carry on Commons is definitionally illegal under U.S. law. (Obviously, when if people upload content that is illegal, and we're informed about its presence, we'll remove it -- most likely, volunteers will remove it even before it gets the attention of the Foundation staff.) If we judge Commons content simply on the basis of Does this content serves the mission of the projects? there is no doubt that some content will removed, some offensive content will not be removed, and Commons will no longer be a kind of dumping ground for anything and everything regardless of whether content lacks encyclopedic usefulness. As a side-effect of this, you probably get both (a) a resource that is somewhat more family friendly (because the sheer frequency of merely offensive images is reduced) and (b) a resource that remains essentially uncensored, consistent with its encyclopedic mission. (I use uncensored here to mean not edited merely to avoid offense.) Hi Mike! Longtime fan, first-time emailer. :) First of all, I want to say I've seen a couple of people questioned your integrity today, and I was very sorry to see that. I was really happy when I heard you were joining us, and I haven't seen anything here today from you but a nice guy calmly trying to help things. :) I think the reason you're having a hard time getting people to discuss the policy formation is that, overall, there isn't that much disagreement among the bulk of the community. We all basically agree that there has to be a limit to the images in Commons. We all agree that images which aren't helping the project or a sibling project probably don't need to be hanging out on Commons. It's not flickr, and we're all basically okay with the fact that it's not flickr. The only reason this dispute exists is because one side of the dispute is the founder. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/5/8 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. I don't know what you're going to do, but that's certainly not what I was suggesting. I was thinking more the content that's educational only to a narrow niche of abnormal psychologists and/or medical professionals. On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Excirial wp.excir...@gmail.com wrote: Why do you believe that there is a need to make a choice between groups of people? You agreed yourself that there were certain images that were inappropriate for children, but would be educational and/or informative for certain niche professionals. That sounds to me like a choice needs to be made. It's just like the choices that are made in every encyclopedia article on Wikipedia. Present the topic in a way geared toward niche professionals, or present it in a way geared toward the general public. I wouldn't consider either choice to be censorship, not by any reasonable definition of the term. We can easily supply all the data - it is up to the user to decide if they want to access it. Supplying all the data and letting the user decide what they want to access is not at all helpful. A raw dump of facts is not helpful. No, choices have to be made in order to turn that raw dump of facts into an educational resource. And that means choosing your audience. Am I saying that audience should be families, and there is no other acceptable choice. No, I'm not. There are plenty of other acceptable choices. On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: For what it's worth, I personally don't see the issue as one of making Commons (or Wikipedia or any other project) family-friendly. If we judge Commons content simply on the basis of Does this content serves the mission of the projects? there is no doubt that some content will removed, some offensive content will not be removed, and Commons will no longer be a kind of dumping ground for anything and everything regardless of whether content lacks encyclopedic usefulness. I don't think so. At least not by the standard deletion processes that are currently in place. Just about any content can be said to contain encyclopedic usefulness if you take that to mean it could conceivably be used for educational purposes by someone. Even the most obscene and information-lacking content can be argued to be educational, if for no other purpose than the purpose of giving an example of content which is obscene and information-lacking (and moreover, I've seen these types of arguments being made). Encyclopedic usefulness is meaningless without first defining your audience. Yes, the term family friendly is often used to mean something akin to prudish christian conservative, but that's not the way I intended it. I intended it exactly the way it is written, content which is useful for teaching within the context of a family. That includes nudity, violence, sex, and Tank Man, all things which a family would be negligent in *not* teaching their children about (or at least giving them the materials to learn for themselves). I didn't say anything about whether or not the images are offensive. The idea that family friendly would mean not offensive to anyone is a bastardization of the English language, not the terminology I was using. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 8:07 PM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: Has it occurred to you that we could simply _age-rate_ articles, rather than delete them? An article on a pornographic novel could be 18-rated, just like the novel itself. Same with porn star bios, which aren't likely to be of interest to 9-year-olds. I would really like people to understand that when entering Wikipedia with an adult setting, you would never know any difference to how it is now. But if you're entering with a 12-year-old setting, you would not see the article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogg_(novel) for example. What is so bad about that idea? Is it censorship to show adult-rated material to adults, but not to 12-year-olds? Framing this in terms of gutting or censoring Wikimedia projects completely misses the point. We could just work within our existing category scheme and add another tab to Special:Preferences that specifies what images you want to see... e.g. if you want to hide sex-related images, you check a box and wouldn't say images in the Sex, Penis, Vagina, etc. categories. If you're a Muslim, you can check a box so you don't see images in Category:Muhammad. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Hi, On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 3:37 PM, Mike Godwin mnemo...@gmail.com wrote: Tomek writes: So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? For what it's worth, I personally don't see the issue as one of making Commons (or Wikipedia or any other project) family-friendly. I believe that's called Conservapedia. -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
*You agreed yourself that there were certain images that were inappropriate for children, but would be educational and/or informative for certain niche professionals. That sounds to me like a choice needs to be made. It's just like the choices that are made in every encyclopedia article on Wikipedia. Present the topic in a way geared toward niche professionals, or present it in a way geared toward the general public. I wouldn't consider either choice to be censorship, not by any reasonable definition of the term.* Educational and inappropriate are not static terms, as the definition can vary between groups of people. Ergo, take the group pre-puberty kids. Plenty of parents would find it objectionable if their children would encounter any nude material, even if it is not remotely sexual. Based upon that definition we would have to remove every image we have that depicts a reproductive organs, including but not limited to photographs, diagrams and paintings. That would - in essence - be required for a child friendly encyclopedia. Referring back to my previous response - in that reply i mentioned the gangrene page, which contains some rather gross images. Fit for children to stare at? Many parents would answer that with a firm no. However, we should again take into account that man will not run into these images unless looking for the topic, or for a related topic. Ask yourself - why would any child be at the gangrene or sexual organ page, if not for their own curiosity? Explicit images tend to be placed on pages that children should not be at in the first place. In other words, we don't really make a choice. We describe the topic as well as we can, even though that might mean that certain groups disagree. Another example: Sesame Street. It is a topic that is likely to attract children, but i can assure you that the pagehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Streetwill be quite cryptic for them as it is written for an adult audience. Why? Because we added all the relevant information without specifically aiming for a certain group, and therefor it becomes unintelligible for children. *Supplying all the data and letting the user decide what they want to access is not at all helpful. A raw dump of facts is not helpful. No, choices have to be made in order to turn that raw dump of facts into an educational resource. And that means choosing your audience. *That is why we have content guidelines and policies, but i do not believe they ever explicitly refer to a certain group of people. Instead they form a framework which might or might not appeal to certain groups. Hence, i clearly said that we take all the raw data and distillate it into information as long as it is relevant for the article. We do not say Hey, that image of a penis is inappropriate on the penis page as children could look at it. Instead it is deemed relevant information for that particular page. There is, however, no need to use explicit images if not required. If it does not illustrate an article in a reasonable way it should go. * Am I saying that audience should be families, and there is no other acceptable choice. No, I'm not. There are plenty of other acceptable choices.* How about undergraduate or masters educated males aged 26,8 years without partners or children? :) (Linkhttp://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Plan/Movement_Priorities#Encourage_Diversity) ~Excirial On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 2:12 AM, Anthony wikim...@inbox.org wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 5:55 PM, Tomasz Ganicz polime...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/5/8 Anthony wikim...@inbox.org: I dunno, when framed that way it seems the answer is to be family-friendly, and to let the specialists get their information in specialist resources. So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. I don't know what you're going to do, but that's certainly not what I was suggesting. I was thinking more the content that's educational only to a narrow niche of abnormal psychologists and/or medical professionals. On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 6:24 PM, Excirial wp.excir...@gmail.com wrote: Why do you believe that there is a need to make a choice between groups of people? You agreed yourself that there were certain images that were inappropriate for children, but would be educational and/or informative for certain niche professionals. That sounds to me like a choice needs to be made. It's just like the choices that are made in every encyclopedia article on Wikipedia. Present the topic in a way geared toward niche professionals, or present it in a way geared toward the general public. I wouldn't consider either choice to be censorship, not by any
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Excirial wp.excir...@gmail.com wrote: Educational and inappropriate are not static terms, as the definition can vary between groups of people. I disagree with this. Ergo, take the group pre-puberty kids. Plenty of parents would find it objectionable if their children would encounter any nude material, even if it is not remotely sexual. Based upon that definition we would have to remove every image we have that depicts a reproductive organs, including but not limited to photographs, diagrams and paintings. Sounds like a bad definition, then. Plenty of parents would find it objectionable is a strawman. I don't believe anyone here has claimed that this is a sufficient grounds for removal. I certainly haven't. In fact, I haven't even said that the Wikimedia Foundation should strive to create a resource which is useful for families. If that is not the audience you wish to target, then by all means don't target them. But then, don't target them. Don't put Jimmy Wales up on your banner ads talking about how you're creating an educational resource for the child in Africa. Don't claim you're creating a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet. Leave that to someone else to do, and to do right. Referring back to my previous response - in that reply i mentioned the gangrene page, which contains some rather gross images. Fit for children to stare at? To stare at? Let's ask a more reasonable question. Is it appropriate for a parent to show to this article to their child, assuming their child is of an appropriate age to learn about the topic in the first place. But let's not ask that question of this particular page. Let's develop a set of principles that allows us to answer it in general. Many parents would answer that with a firm no. Once again, I don't care what many parents would answer. The question is what ought we be creating. If you don't think that's the kind of question that can be answered objectively, then let's just end this whole conversation right now. There's no point in discussing what type of material ought to be distributed by the WMF if you think there's no right answer to that question. If you do think there is a right answer to that question, then by all means let's start discussing that, and not what many parents would answer. Ask yourself - why would any child be at the gangrene or sexual organ page, if not for their own curiosity? Explicit images tend to be placed on pages that children should not be at in the first place. Wait a second. You're saying that a child should not learn about gangrene or sexual organs? Sounds like you're the prude, not me. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 10:07 AM, Andreas Kolbe jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. Has it occurred to you that we could simply _age-rate_ articles, rather than delete them? An article on a pornographic novel could be 18-rated, just like the novel itself. Same with porn star bios, which aren't likely to be of interest to 9-year-olds. I object to the assertion that images and discussion of reproductive organs is unsuitable for children under a certain age. This is primarily a Western Anglophone cultural assumption – and it doesn't hold true in all such parts of the world either. There's certainly no medical or psychological research which suggests that exposure to educational content about reproduction has a negative impact on child development. I grew up in Suburban Sydney. When I was barely five years old my parents gave me, as part of a How My Body Works series, a book about human reproduction, including detailed diagrams and illustrations. It is *NOT* *OUR* *ROLE* to decide what is and is not appropriate for children to view on our website. That role is to be discharged solely by parents and supervisors of those children. The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly. The infrastructure would be technically simple. -- Andrew Garrett http://werdn.us/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote: The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly. The infrastructure would be technically simple. I definitely agree that this would be the best solution. -- Casey Brown Cbrown1023 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
So... are we now going to start writting USfamilyfriendlypedia(tm) ? There is plenty of stuff to be delete then... not only penis and vagina pictures... For example delete all biographies of porn-stars, articles about addictive violent computer games, and there is tons of things to be deleted in order to make our projects more family friendy. Has it occurred to you that we could simply _age-rate_ articles, rather than delete them? An article on a pornographic novel could be 18-rated, just like the novel itself. Same with porn star bios, which aren't likely to be of interest to 9-year-olds. I would really like people to understand that when entering Wikipedia with an adult setting, you would never know any difference to how it is now. But if you're entering with a 12-year-old setting, you would not see the article on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hogg_(novel) for example. What is so bad about that idea? Is it censorship to show adult-rated material to adults, but not to 12-year-olds? Framing this in terms of gutting or censoring Wikimedia projects completely misses the point. Andreas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/05/2010 22:20, Casey Brown wrote: On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 9:16 PM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote: The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly. The infrastructure would be technically simple. I definitely agree that this would be the best solution. I agree too. Simple and respectful. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJL5jK5AAoJEHCAuDvx9Z6LNQAH/0p1G+kwOdSt/OOYelMNXwwE Z0/VWKbrHvDrENE156GxsCPRZpsDJyuQdQ92Lx+IQj+nE9uowaT1c+s7J8riLI3N oxJ8QHHsq9bovxI6f2uBbEFwdWlo9iKyfn7Av7hKzBGzPtFRuNKWKQ6yNbd4ivXN qblzvpUsqrQWMsEnNcsk8DLV8rlmbu5JWOVBkccn31svi2/i2Ij38cg0fqfv3aum KR5hbngERbb64Z9LQBKbsaVowB9f5oqcU8XW13y/L8BkQNSQa8SW/tS0jb0qz8PY IkXQOg0sI3wLlFsyi26dYyztHxZWJSpK8cfHoxw+wN03TGOXCsQIlFG/zEO0FW8= =WPEE -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:16 AM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.org wrote: It is *NOT* *OUR* *ROLE* to decide what is and is not appropriate for children to view on our website. That role is to be discharged solely by parents and supervisors of those children. The *ONLY* rating and classification system that I can support is a descriptive one. That is, it describes the nature of the content, and allows humans or computers to filter it accordingly. The infrastructure would be technically simple. Bugzilla 982[1] MediaWiki should support ICRA's PICS content labeling. From my understanding without reading much about it, It [ICRA] is ment to be a international or at least a standard for these things which most people seem to abide by (i see it splashed around on a lot of education sites that they are compliant with that standard). -Peachey [1]. https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=982 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Distributing this more widely, since apparently the forwarding from announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new material continually being added. The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the grounds that it may offend. Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no such value. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Hoi, I learned about the imminence of this announcement and as I often do I blogged about it. As you will read I am in favour of scrutinizing much of the material that is largely irrelevant. At the same time there are historical reasons why we should not go overboard and remove much of the material that is of value or put labels on material that is obviously problematic. Thanks, GerardM http://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2010/05/nudity-sexual-content-on-wikipedia.html On 7 May 2010 21:30, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Distributing this more widely, since apparently the forwarding from announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new material continually being added. The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the grounds that it may offend. Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no such value. --Michael Snow ___ 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
On 7 May 2010 20:30, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. Err the user namespace? the project namespace? In saying this, we don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no such value. Given the overwelming majority of projects have no such policy the statement would appear to be flawed. For example what policy would you suggests applies on be.wikipedia ? -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On 7 May 2010 22:27, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Is there some particular reason for using that as an example? Only in that it's the one I'm aware of from old BLP debates. The statement makes exactly the same error as was being made then. Making a statement supposedly about all projects when really at most it is only coherent with regards to a handful of them. -- geni ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote: announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject? sincerly, Kim Bruning -- [Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment] gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key FEF9DD72 5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A 01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On 7 May 2010 16:07, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote: announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject? sincerly, Kim Bruning Kim, the board (and I) have been talking about this for the past couple of days, and we'll continue to talk about it over the next couple of weeks. I think it's fairly likely there will be some kind of statement or statements at the end of that. I'm expecting that over the next few weeks, we all will be paying attention to the conversations on Commons and elsewhere, including here. Thanks, Sue -- Sue Gardner Executive Director Wikimedia Foundation 415 839 6885 office Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality! 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] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Sue Gardner sgard...@wikimedia.org wrote: Kim, the board (and I) have been talking about this for the past couple of days, and we'll continue to talk about it over the next couple of weeks. I think it's fairly likely there will be some kind of statement or statements at the end of that. I'm expecting that over the next few weeks, we all will be paying attention to the conversations on Commons and elsewhere, including here. Thanks, Sue If the board is still discussing the matter nothing should be getting done (the deletion) till the board has finished and finalized it's discussions, It's not differnt than a cop arresting someone for a law which doesn't exist or isn't passed yet (oh wait... yeah american's and their love of Contempt of Cop) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
Kim Bruning wrote: On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 12:30:18PM -0700, Michael Snow wrote: announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: Just to be sure: Are there no other statements that have been made by the board or are being planned to be made by the board on this subject? For what it's worth, Jay Walsh has posted a QA at wikimediafoundation.org.[1] It seems like a lot of bullshit and spin to me, but perhaps there are nuggets of valuable information buried somewhere in there. MZMcBride [1] http://wikimedia.org/wiki/QA_Wikimedia_Commons_images_review,_May_2010 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
[Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
One thing which I would have wished the Board's statement to address is the need for some sort of content rating and filtering system that will enable parents, schools and libraries to screen out content unsuitable for minors. Anyone giving minors access to Commons presently also gives them ready access to collections of pornographic media, via categories such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:BDSM (and its various subcategories). I am concerned about this, because it reflects poorly on the project. It is also against the law in parts of the world. In Germany, for example, The spreading of pornographic content and other harmful media via the internet is a criminal offence under German jurisdiction. A pornographic content on the internet is legal only if technical measures prohibit minors from getting access to the object (AVS = Age Verification System or Adult-Check-System). From: http://www.bundespruefstelle.de/bpjm/information-in-english.html As far as I am concerned, the community consensus model has failed us here, resulting in immature decision-making. The same thing goes for Wikipedia articles that contain pornographic material. We should have content rating categories, so schools and libraries can make Wikipedia accessible to minors without fearing that they will * lose their E-Rate funding (per the Children's Internet Protection Act, http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html -- Schools and libraries subject to CIPA may not receive the discounts offered by the E-rate program unless they certify that they have an Internet safety policy that includes technology protection measures. The protection measures must block or filter Internet access to pictures that are: (a) obscene, (b) child pornography, or (c) harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors)), or * will be found to have infringed laws if a parent, say, complains to a teacher about their child having stumbled upon our hardcore pornography on a school computer. Doing nothing to address concerns that are widespread in society is risky and foolhardy. There is also the issue of underage admins being asked to administer hardcore pornographic content, making deletion decisions etc. It doesn't look good and will come to bite us sooner or later, if it is not addressed. Andreas (Jayen466) On 7 May 2010 21:30, Michael Snow wikipedia at verizon.net wrote: Distributing this more widely, since apparently the forwarding from announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new material continually being added. The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the grounds that it may offend. Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal of assessing their educational or informational value, and to remove them from the projects if there is no such value. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
The only existing US law that I think Commons might possibly not be complying with is the requirement to ensure that the models of some pictures are not minors; to what extent these provisions might be retroactive, IANAL, much less a specialist in these matters, is something that I do not know. But I do know about matters pertaining to libraries, and the responsibility for filtering is on them, not the information providers, or the sites which post the information. Most libraries deal with this by outsourcing, and relying on the standards of the providers of the filters. I see no reason why we should cooperate with censorship, however well intentioned. We should, however, maintain our own standards. (Because it is appropriate to provide some guides about our content to users generally, maintaining certain images in a collection labelled BDSM, and ensuring they have clearly descriptive titles--which remains incomplete in Commons more generally than just these images-- would seem to me quite adequate information about their likely nature. ) David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 11:39 PM, Jayen466 jayen...@yahoo.com wrote: One thing which I would have wished the Board's statement to address is the need for some sort of content rating and filtering system that will enable parents, schools and libraries to screen out content unsuitable for minors. Anyone giving minors access to Commons presently also gives them ready access to collections of pornographic media, via categories such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:BDSM (and its various subcategories). I am concerned about this, because it reflects poorly on the project. It is also against the law in parts of the world. In Germany, for example, The spreading of pornographic content and other harmful media via the internet is a criminal offence under German jurisdiction. A pornographic content on the internet is legal only if technical measures prohibit minors from getting access to the object (AVS = Age Verification System or Adult-Check-System). From: http://www.bundespruefstelle.de/bpjm/information-in-english.html As far as I am concerned, the community consensus model has failed us here, resulting in immature decision-making. The same thing goes for Wikipedia articles that contain pornographic material. We should have content rating categories, so schools and libraries can make Wikipedia accessible to minors without fearing that they will * lose their E-Rate funding (per the Children's Internet Protection Act, http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/cipa.html -- Schools and libraries subject to CIPA may not receive the discounts offered by the E-rate program unless they certify that they have an Internet safety policy that includes technology protection measures. The protection measures must block or filter Internet access to pictures that are: (a) obscene, (b) child pornography, or (c) harmful to minors (for computers that are accessed by minors)), or * will be found to have infringed laws if a parent, say, complains to a teacher about their child having stumbled upon our hardcore pornography on a school computer. Doing nothing to address concerns that are widespread in society is risky and foolhardy. There is also the issue of underage admins being asked to administer hardcore pornographic content, making deletion decisions etc. It doesn't look good and will come to bite us sooner or later, if it is not addressed. Andreas (Jayen466) On 7 May 2010 21:30, Michael Snow wikipedia at verizon.net wrote: Distributing this more widely, since apparently the forwarding from announce-l still has issues. The Board of Trustees has directed me to release the following statement: The Wikimedia Foundation projects aim to bring the sum of human knowledge to every person on the planet. To that end, our projects contain a vast amount of material. Currently, there are more than six million images and 15 million articles on the Wikimedia sites, with new material continually being added. The vast majority of that material is entirely uncontroversial, but the projects do contain material that may be inappropriate or offensive to some audiences, such as children or people with religious or cultural sensitivities. That is consistent with Wikimedia's goal to provide the sum of all human knowledge. We do immediately remove material that is illegal under U.S. law, but we do not remove material purely on the grounds that it may offend. Having said that, the Wikimedia projects are intended to be educational in nature, and there is no place in the projects for material that has no educational or informational value. In saying this, we don't intend to create new policy, but rather to reaffirm and support policy that already exists. We encourage Wikimedia editors to scrutinize potentially offensive materials with the goal
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
I can't follow your reasoning there. Ensuring that Commons can be safely viewed by minors is not censorship, in my opinion. I am actually fine with uncensored pornographic content for adults, but I think we will end up cutting ourselves off from the younger generation if we don't cooperate with filtering systems. Commons content is dynamic and comprises 6.5 million media files. How would a library or school filter that content? And if it is not feasible for them to do so, the easiest way out for them, in order to avoid controversy, is to not allow access to the site at all, which is our loss. Andreas The only existing US law that I think Commons might possibly not be complying with is the requirement to ensure that the models of some pictures are not minors; to what extent these provisions might be retroactive, IANAL, much less a specialist in these matters, is something that I do not know. But I do know about matters pertaining to libraries, and the responsibility for filtering is on them, not the information providers, or the sites which post the information. Most libraries deal with this by outsourcing, and relying on the standards of the providers of the filters. I see no reason why we should cooperate with censorship, however well intentioned. We should, however, maintain our own standards. (Because it is appropriate to provide some guides about our content to users generally, maintaining certain images in a collection labelled BDSM, and ensuring they have clearly descriptive titles--which remains incomplete in Commons more generally than just these images-- would seem to me quite adequate information about their likely nature. ) David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Statement on appropriate educational content
On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 3:06 PM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: ... I see no reason why we should cooperate with censorship, however well intentioned. I think cooperation with censorship is the only safe ground. If we perform censorship ourselves, the quality of our projects suffers and/or contributors leave in disgust. If we are uncooperative with censorship, we are in effect using our projects, which have a very large footprint on the internet, to aggressively force the issue. I think this is a distraction. Whether or not our readers accept or desire censorship is their decision, and it is common for parents to want to censor what their children can access. That is the reality of it. I agree with Andreas that is our loss if we force these people to ban Wikipedia when they would prefer to censor only the most obscene. Instead of deleting pornographic content that we deem important to the projects, we can tag those images in a uniform manner and emit POWDER ICRA labelling[1] or similar. The filters can then scale with us. 1. http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/NOTE-powder-primer-20090901/#ICRA1 -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
