Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: Several women, including on WikiProject Feminism on the English Wikipedia, have recently expressed concern about the number of photographs of women's body parts that Wikimedia hosts, particularly regarding the issue of permission. It's far from clear in many cases that the women have given consent. It's also sometimes unclear that the subjects are above the age of consent. Another concern is what a woman is meant to do if someone uploads an image of her without her knowledge. Is she supposed to write to an anonymous person at OTRS? Does she have to give her real name? How does it work? Any information from the Foundation about the legal situation, and what Foundation policy is, would be very helpful. Sarah The matter is discussed at Commons:Photographs of identifiable people https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people Fred In addition the Board passed a resolution dealing with an aspect of this last spring: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Resolution:Images_of_identifiable_people But that resolution focuses on images of identifiable living people, since it seemed to us that's where the most immediate potential for harm lay. However, one important aspect of that resolution was the notion of the right to privacy, and the fact that people in private situations in particular (such as non-professional bedroom situations) where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy should have the right to consent to having photos of themselves freely licensed on Commons, and we should obtain consent before using this kind of photo. US law is actually quite permissive on this point, unlike some national laws, but we see it as an ethical issue as well. So that's the board's position on that part of the issue. The point in that resolution that all projects should have similar policies still needs to be addressed. Practically speaking there have been a few deletion debates on Commons where the issue came up and real names were not mentioned; deletion debates for images are much like for articles on Wikipedia. Or you could write OTRS. Verification gets tricky if it isn't identifiable and wasn't uploaded by you, but as John writes often that's just a reasonable-person test, and as Sarah writes often these photos add little value or are poor quality anyway. (I am particularly concerned with bulk uploads from other services that don't have such policies in place, such as Flickr, because provenance and consent becomes very difficult to trace in that case.) Positives: I'm with John -- sexuality and related are important topics, and we should have the best possible illustrations etc. we can get; I would personally love to see us partner with a responsible education project or the like for this kind of content. -- phoebe ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 22:22, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: As Sarah Stierch points out, our images of sexuality and reproduction are crap, broadly speaking, and our paperwork/processes are self-evidently not good for attracting high quality photographs. What processes should we put in place to encourage good quality photographs of this kind. e.g. should we set up a separate OTRS queue to process the paperwork for these photographs? Should it be managed by verified non-anonymous women only? This last point is an excellent suggestion. Lots of people would be rightly reluctant to email a completely anonymous email address, read by lots of people, about such a sensitive issue. If there were a dedicated address, where the complaint would be read and handled only by other women, that could make a huge difference. Sarah What shows up in a OTRS request is your username and your email address. However, the nature of most objectionable material usually reveals identity. My thought is that there should be a women's OTRS address which handles any request, including matters which do not relate to images, which women want to address only to women. If that makes it easier to approach us regarding delicate issues it should be available. I suppose there would have to also be women only review. However, I'm not real sure how material is assigned to queues within OTRS, so the possibility exists of a request being viewed by a man on its way to the women's queue. Fred ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Increasing Visibility of Diversity and Women on Wikipedia
Here is the deletion log, for reference, regarding African American women it looks like the desire was to have it used as a main category and then have sub categories added to it, and I think that makes sense, but I also understand some aren't categorized. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2011_July_16 How come Kara Walker, who identifies strongly as a black female artist, is generalized as an African American woman when I'd rather see her as an African American female artist. I guess that's too detailed, but, for me, as a researcher who writes primarily about African American and Native American artists, I desire categories like this to make my research easier. Instead I get a generic list of African American artists which is so incomplete: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_visual_artists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2011_July_16 I also get told I desire to categorize in a way too detailed manner and that my own writing style is too high brow for Wikipedia then I find my articles getting simplified in a manner that pains me to read. :P And that's writing about art. Here is the categorization policy for race, gender, sexuality: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality#Ethnicity_and_race I think they read really poorly...like a large portion of documentation in Wikipedia. (And let's not get into the anthropological discussion about race...shall we? ;-) ) Some of the rationale is interesting, and honestly, as a white person who writes about African American artists, the need for non-white people to contribute to Wikipedia is as important as closing the gender gap in general. I know quite a few people who would disagree with statements like this, not only does it read poorly for the sake of policy, it reads poorly in general. It offends me, and I'm anglo. Who the hell wants to contribute to a website when you read people stating that your own culture and community is not 'worthy of.. - Being African American is not in itself worthy of categorisation, so the articles at the top level should be removed I also found these entertaining: - Someone else argues that Oh yes, African American women's history is a valid scholarly field. The fact that even needs to be argued makes me scratch my head (I feel sorry that the person has to waste their breath to explain that!) - Another states that it's sexist if there isn't a category for African American male artists or whatnot. - Irish Americans are brought into the mix, obviously some of them are oblivious to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_people_of_Irish_descent - WOW someone brings up the concept of the term African American being moot because of the One Drop Rule are you kidding me? If African American is moot how come so many people identify as black or African American in America? /facepalm It's situations like this where we desperately need the input of not only African Americans, or non-white individuals, but, also people with scholarly backgrounds who are educated in these topic areas. Just the fact that the guy would bring up the one drop room and declare African American moot is enough to make my revisionist self foam at the mouth. I don't know much about female sports and Asian American tennis players to provide much of an opinion. :-/ Sorry you've been put through so much and disappointed by policies regarding categorization. This mailing list is a safe place to share your thoughts and feelings! #wikilove! Sarah -- GLAMWIKI Partnership Ambassador for the Wikimedia Foundationhttp://www.glamwiki.org Wikipedian-in-Residence, Archives of American Arthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch and Sarah Stierch Consulting *Historical, cultural artistic research advising.* -- http://www.sarahstierch.com/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Childless couples
From WP:Feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Feminism#Outrageous_male_bias Man our talk page has been blowing up lately The article for [[childfree]] is just as weird, including this odd photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childfree#Motivations So glad we have a photo of a guy doing research to illustrate this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childfree#Statistics_and_research Enjoy! -- GLAMWIKI Partnership Ambassador for the Wikimedia Foundationhttp://www.glamwiki.org Wikipedian-in-Residence, Archives of American Arthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch and Sarah Stierch Consulting *Historical, cultural artistic research advising.* -- http://www.sarahstierch.com/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Childless couples
The article for [[childfree]] is just as weird, including this odd photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childfree#Motivations So glad we have a photo of a guy doing research to illustrate this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childfree#Statistics_and_research The same user, Tesseract2, added both photos: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Childfreediff=409889868oldid=409888607 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Childfreediff=405980864oldid=405979924 Daniel Case___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs ofwomen
(I am particularly concerned with bulk uploads from other services that don't have such policies in place, such as Flickr, because provenance and consent becomes very difficult to trace in that case.) climb on favorite hobby horse at first This is, of course, another side effect of our overly dogmatic fair-use policy, where it's free like speech as well as free like beer takes precedence over it's a good-quality, responsibly-taken image (I bet we didn't have these problems when fair use was permitted more broadly). Yesterday after reading Sarah's comment about [[Pregnancy]] still leading off with an image of a naked woman, I not only added my voice to the talk-page consensus that such an image was not necessary (WhatamIdoing made the very relevant point that it's not necessary to depict mammary swelling since it does not always occur during pregnancy and, at that range, it's small enough that it wouldn't really be well conveyed in a picture anyway), I looked at the Commons category, not just the well-populated Nude pregnant women one but the broader Pregnant women one. There are certainly better images like the USDA one that seems to be the favored replacement, but I did notice a lot of the Flickr scrapes, and I really wonder if we should be rewarding exhibitionists just for using the CC-BY license (and Phoebe's complaint also fits in the broader issue of Flickr's apparent disdain for enforcing copyright, to the point that we have a whole page at Commons of blacklisted Flickwashers). This has come up before, with a whole bunch of homemade porn on Commons that was uploaded under PD-self so people could use them to vandalize articles. The vandals have long been blocked but the pictures are still there. /climb down Daniel Case ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
