Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
the key distinction is that a method for getting a list of files in a category is a good thing for many purposes, and is morally totally neutral. The ethical questions depend on what other people do with the list, and like all intellectual work, it can be used for ends any person might think desirable or undesirable. To use it for compiling a better guide to content than we can do ourselves, for example, would be a very good end. We might want to restrict people from using it to a bad end, as suggested by some, by altering our terms of service, but that would be opposed to our being a free resource in the expansive sense of free that commons is, and would contradict our licensing. The opportunity for an individual to select what images to see, another proposal, is also neutral. on the other hand, adding descriptors for levels of suitability set by or corresponding to those set by outside sources cannot be used for a good end, but only for the bad end of censorship. And it contradicts our basic policy that we do not make conclusions about suitability or truth or other values. There is no reason to actively work to gain a capacity that can only be used by those who oppose the basic values of free culture. It's as if we added a capacity to the software to charge for viewing an article--and that's not even intrinsically wrong, but it's not a suitable purpose for free software. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 7:41 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: I've read most of the replies in this thread, And i think I should point out a few things out: * The omg tagging for any reason is censorship mentality is a needless, Yes we tag things presently *shock horror* look at the currently category system. * Omg adding this to Mediawiki will destroy Wikipedia Currently Mediawiki is a separate application from wiki and always will be, Wikipedia is just a site that uses Mediawiki for it's back end. Just because Mediawiki supports something, doesn't mean it will be activated (or in the case of extensions, installed) on Wikipedia and Wikipedia isn't the only site that uses Mediawiki. ** Currently there are two discussions about possible implementation: A) Bug 982: Is referring to a EXTENSION that provides the functionality of tagging content (with it's current discussion being pointed at ICRA) so it has a rating of sorts which can be used by external sources (AKA filtering companies) B) The discussion on wikitech-l is currently discussing a way (either extension or a core functionality) to accurately grab the contents of a category and provide it in a usable interface so that again, it can be used by third parties. Currently this discussions has hardly approached the rating system discussion (who it would be done? own internal scale? some sort of standard out there?). * The lesser of two evils, Currently there is no easy way to get a list of the files (and their file paths) of images contained within a category, This can be applied for multiple things (bots for example) but use, the discussion is primarily about a exportable format so a machine can easily use it. Schools and Filter providers are currently blocking whole W* projects because there are no easy ways to do it. Unfortunately the lesser of the two evils is allow a easy way for a company to get a list of what is contained in a certain category (Eg: Category:Images of BDSM) and then import that into the filtering system to block them compared to the whole project. JUST A REMINDER: The current discussions are revolving around implementations in Mediawiki as either as a core functionality (like most of these, being enabled/disabledable) or as a extension, and not of how to implement this in the WMF hemisphere of projects such as for example commons. ___ 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] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Dear Derk-jan, As for 1), I think youtube can be compared in populairity and size with wikipedia, and in videos surpasses commons. Youtube enables its visitors to tag videos as adult. see for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA22WSVlCZ4 kind regards, Teun Spaans On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.comwrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- Dear reader at FOSI, As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions. Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous problems, because for the first time, a largely uncensored system has to work in the boundaries of a world that is largely censored. For libraries and schools this means that they want to provide Wikipedia and its related projects to their readers, but are presented with the problem of what some people might consider, information that is not child-safe. They have several options in that case, either blocking completely or using context aware filtering software that may make mistakes, that can cost some of these institutions their funding. Similar problems are starting to present themselves in countries around the world, differing views about sexuality between northern and southern europe for instance. Add to that the censoring of images of Muhammad, Tiananman square, the Nazi Swastika, and a host of other problems. Recently there has been concern that all this all-out-censoring of content by parties around the world is damaging the education mission of the Wikipedia related projects because so many people are not able to access large portions of our content due to a small (think 0.01% ) part of our other content. This has led some people to infer that perhaps it is time to rate the content of Wikipedia ourselves, in order to facilitate external censoring of material, hopefully making the rest of our content more accessible. According to statements around the web ICRA ratings are probably the most widely supported rating by filtering systems. Thus we were thinking of adding autogenerated ICRA RDF tags to each individual page describing the rating of the page and the images contained within them. I have a few questions however, both general and technical. 1: If I am correctly informed, Wikipedia would be the first website of this size to label their content with ratings, is this correct? 2: How many content filters understand the RDF tags 3: How many of those understand multiple labels and path specific labeling. This means: if we rate the path of images included on the page different from the page itself, do filters block the entire content, or just the images ? (Consider the Virgin Killer album cover on the Virgin Killer article, if you are aware of that controversial image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer) 4: Do filters understand per page labeling ? Or do they cache the first RDF file they encounter on a website and use that for all other pages of the website ? 5: Is there any chance the vocabulary of ICRA can be expanded with new ratings for non-Western world sensitive issues ? 6: Is there a possibility of creating a separate namespace that we could potentially use for our own labels ? I hope that you can help me answer these questions, so that we may continue our community debate with more informed viewpoints about the possibilities of content rating. If you have additional suggestions for systems or problems that this web-property should account for, I would more than welcome those suggestions as well. Derk-Jan Hartman ___ 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] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:27 PM, teun spaans teun.spa...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Derk-jan, As for 1), I think youtube can be compared in populairity and size with wikipedia, and in videos surpasses commons. Youtube enables its visitors to tag videos as adult. I think there is a difference between using tags/categories like contains the depiction of a female breast or contains a portrait of Muhammad and suitable for adults only or offensive to Islam. The first way is an objective categorisation, and I see nothing wrong in someone else using such categorisation to censor contents, while the second way is too much culture dependent. Even a concept like nudity strongly depends on culture, so I wouldn't use it as a categorisation. Cruccone ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Presumably you mean nude female breast, and then you are involved with exactly the nudity definition dilemma you allude to. If you mean nude or clothed, Every full or half length picture of a woman seen from the front or side contains a depiction of the female breast. As another consideration, If we are out to describe the image, we would need to put in an tag for nude male breast also, and presumably other sometimes uncovered parts of the body, like the hand. Otherwise we are concentrating on tagging those portions of images that are sexually charged, and the only reason for doing that preferentially is to facilitate censorship. (or to facilitate access by those who want sexually charged material over those who want access to other kinds of material). Neither is an appropriate function for a free encyclopedia. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Marco Chiesa chiesa.ma...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:27 PM, teun spaans teun.spa...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Derk-jan, As for 1), I think youtube can be compared in populairity and size with wikipedia, and in videos surpasses commons. Youtube enables its visitors to tag videos as adult. I think there is a difference between using tags/categories like contains the depiction of a female breast or contains a portrait of Muhammad and suitable for adults only or offensive to Islam. The first way is an objective categorisation, and I see nothing wrong in someone else using such categorisation to censor contents, while the second way is too much culture dependent. Even a concept like nudity strongly depends on culture, so I wouldn't use it as a categorisation. Cruccone ___ 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] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
I've read most of the replies in this thread, And i think I should point out a few things out: * The omg tagging for any reason is censorship mentality is a needless, Yes we tag things presently *shock horror* look at the currently category system. * Omg adding this to Mediawiki will destroy Wikipedia Currently Mediawiki is a separate application from wiki and always will be, Wikipedia is just a site that uses Mediawiki for it's back end. Just because Mediawiki supports something, doesn't mean it will be activated (or in the case of extensions, installed) on Wikipedia and Wikipedia isn't the only site that uses Mediawiki. ** Currently there are two discussions about possible implementation: A) Bug 982: Is referring to a EXTENSION that provides the functionality of tagging content (with it's current discussion being pointed at ICRA) so it has a rating of sorts which can be used by external sources (AKA filtering companies) B) The discussion on wikitech-l is currently discussing a way (either extension or a core functionality) to accurately grab the contents of a category and provide it in a usable interface so that again, it can be used by third parties. Currently this discussions has hardly approached the rating system discussion (who it would be done? own internal scale? some sort of standard out there?). * The lesser of two evils, Currently there is no easy way to get a list of the files (and their file paths) of images contained within a category, This can be applied for multiple things (bots for example) but use, the discussion is primarily about a exportable format so a machine can easily use it. Schools and Filter providers are currently blocking whole W* projects because there are no easy ways to do it. Unfortunately the lesser of the two evils is allow a easy way for a company to get a list of what is contained in a certain category (Eg: Category:Images of BDSM) and then import that into the filtering system to block them compared to the whole project. JUST A REMINDER: The current discussions are revolving around implementations in Mediawiki as either as a core functionality (like most of these, being enabled/disabledable) or as a extension, and not of how to implement this in the WMF hemisphere of projects such as for example commons. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Derk-Jan Hartman wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- You asked for comments... Here is one we prepared earlier... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_censorship#ICRA In other words, we have been here, we have done this, and we have the T-shirt. This *HAS* been suggested before, and soundly defeated. Nothing has changed in this respect. I would heartfeltly ask that folks just quit trying to stuff this down the throat of a community that simply does not content labeling. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
I am afraid we will never be able to label our content properly. There will be no chance to keep NPOV regardless how implemented labels will be. Our content is free. If somebody needs labeled content he can label it himself in his own copy of Wikimedia projects. It is a bad idea. Let's not do it. We have better things to do. Jiri Personally, I tend to see ICRA labeling as just another kind of categorization, albeit one with definitions that were defined elsewhere. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Robert Rohde wrote: Personally, I tend to see ICRA labeling as just another kind of categorization, albeit one with definitions that were defined elsewhere. This is precisely and completely absolutely wrong. Labeling is enabling censorship. Labeling images is the worst kind of enablement of censorship, in that it can effect the way a pages informational content is presented to the viewer. If there are people in the community willing to sort content into the ICRA categories and maintain those associations, then I see no problem with Wikimedia supporting that. Having images tagged with [[Category:ICRA Nudity-A (exposed breasts)]] is useful information for people that care about such things. As with most other projects on Wikimedia, I think it mostly comes down to whether there is a community of volunteers who want to work on such issues. Not so. As an argumentum absurdum, let me offer the following proposition: If there are people in the community willing to sort content into categories depending on whether the content is suitable reading material for Catholics (insert your own ideology, religion, political affiliation, or other orientation here) and maintain those associations, then I see no problem with Wikimedia supporting that. See the problem with your argument there? I am sure there would be people who would care about such things. But we just don't do that. And the same applies to ICRA. It does not come down to whether there are enough hands to do the work. It comes down to the fact that our *mission* is to distribute the *whole* of human knowledge to every human in their own language. Period, no ifs or buts. There are, by my rough count, ~75 tags in the current ICRA vocabulary. These cover nudity, sexuality, violence, bad language, drug use, weapons, gambling, and other disturbing material. In addition there are a number of meta tags to identify things like user-generated content, sites with advertising, and sites intended to be educational / news-oriented / religious, etc. We don't do censorship. Period. It appears we could choose to use tags in some categories, e.g. nudity/sexuality, even if we didn't use tags in other categories, e.g. violence. On balance I suspect that participating in such schemes is probably more helpful than harmful since it allows schools and other organizations that would do filtering anyway to block only selected content rather than blocking wide swathes of content or the entire site just to get at 0.01% of content that they fine intolerable. It also provides the public relations benefits of showing we are concerned about such issues, without having to remove or block the content ourselves. The public relations effects would be devastating. There is a reason Wikipedia was blocked in China. It was because we would not help in stuff like this, just to appease the Chinese government. We haven't buckled on this yet. And we won't. The worst possible argument imaginable is that they would do that anyway. That is their option, but we won't help them a red cunt hairs distance on their way. (pardon my french) To be clear, I don't think we should be removing or blocking any content ourselves. Wikimedia is designed for adults and that shouldn't change. However, if there is a content filtering standard that some segment of the community wants to support, then I'm perfectly happy to see that happen. You know what. You may be happy to see it happen. But this question has been put to the community time and again. There have been scores of attempts to vote labeling in. ICRA has been put to the vote at least three times. Each time, no matter how people have tried to dress their proposal as innocous, we have rejected it resoundingly. No, not only resoundinly, but angrily, furiously. We don't do censorship. Period. Sorry about the length of the posting, but this continues to be important, vital, to our community. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- Dear reader at FOSI, As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions. Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous I am strongly in favour of allowing our users to choose what they see. If you don't like it, don't look at it is only useful advice when it's easy to avoid looking at things— and it isn't always on our sites. By marking up our content better and providing the right software tools we could _increase_ choice for our users and that can only be a good thing. At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the EFF and the ALA, I am opposed to these organized content labelling systems. These systems are primary censorship systems and are overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these systems to content providers and politicians. (For more information on the current state of compulsory filtering in the US I recommend the filing in Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library District an ongoing legal battle over a library system refusing to allow adult patrons to bypass the censorware in order to access constitutionally protected speech, in apparent violation of the suggestion by the US Supreme Court that the ability to bypass these filters is what made the filters lawful in the first place http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/waedce/2:2006cv00327/41160/40/0.pdf ) It's arguable if we should fight against the censorship of factual information to adults or merely play no role in it— but it isn't really acceptable to assist it. And even when not used as a method of third party control, these systems require the users to have special software installed— so they aren't all that useful as a method for our users to self-determine what they will see on the site. So it sounds like a lose, lose proposition to me. Labelling systems are also centred around broad classifications, e.g. Drugs, Pornography with definitions which defy NPOV. This will obviously lead to endless arguments on applicability within the site. Many places exempt Wikipedia from their filtering, after all it's all educational, so it would be a step backwards for these people for us to start applying labels that they would have gladly gone without. The filter the drugs category because they want to filter pro-drug advocacy, but if we follow the criteria we may end up with our factual articles bunched into the same bin. A labelling system designed for the full spectrum of internet content simply will not have enough words for our content... or are there really separate labels for Drug _education_, Hate speech _education_, Pornography _education_, etc. ? Urban legend says the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, it's not true... but I think that it is true that for the Wiki(p|m)edia projects we really do need 10 million words for education. Using a third party labelling system we can also expect issues that would arise where we fail to correctly apply the labels, either due to vandalism, limitations of the community process, or simply because of a genuine and well founded difference of opinion. Instead I prefer that we run our own labelling system. By controlling it ourselves we determine its meaning— avoiding terminology disputes without outsiders; we can operate the system in a manner which inhibits its usefulness to the involuntary censorship of adults (e.g. not actually putting the label data in the pages users view in an accessible way, creating site TOS which makes the involuntary application of our filters on adults unlawful), and maximizes its usefulness for user self determination by making the controls available right on the site. The wikimedia sites have enough traffic that its worth peoples time to customize their own preferences. There are many technical ways in which such a system could be constructed, some requiring more development work than others, and while I'd love to blather on a possible methods the important point at this time is to establish the principles before we worry about the tools. Cheers, ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- Dear reader at FOSI, As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions. Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous I am strongly in favour of allowing our users to choose what they see. If you don't like it, don't look at it is only useful advice when it's easy to avoid looking at things— and it isn't always on our sites. By marking up our content better and providing the right software tools we could _increase_ choice for our users and that can only be a good thing. I agree and I'm in favor of WMF allocating resources in order to develop a system that allows users to filter content based on the particular needs of their setting. At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the EFF and the ALA, I am opposed to these organized content labelling systems. These systems are primary censorship systems and are overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these systems to content providers and politicians. (For more information on the current state of compulsory filtering in the US I recommend the filing in Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library District an ongoing legal battle over a library system refusing to allow adult patrons to bypass the censorware in order to access constitutionally protected speech, in apparent violation of the suggestion by the US Supreme Court that the ability to bypass these filters is what made the filters lawful in the first place http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/waedce/2:2006cv00327/41160/40/0.pdf ) It's arguable if we should fight against the censorship of factual information to adults or merely play no role in it— but it isn't really acceptable to assist it. And even when not used as a method of third party control, these systems require the users to have special software installed— so they aren't all that useful as a method for our users to self-determine what they will see on the site. So it sounds like a lose, lose proposition to me. Labelling systems are also centred around broad classifications, e.g. Drugs, Pornography with definitions which defy NPOV. This will obviously lead to endless arguments on applicability within the site. Many places exempt Wikipedia from their filtering, after all it's all educational, so it would be a step backwards for these people for us to start applying labels that they would have gladly gone without. The filter the drugs category because they want to filter pro-drug advocacy, but if we follow the criteria we may end up with our factual articles bunched into the same bin. A labelling system designed for the full spectrum of internet content simply will not have enough words for our content... or are there really separate labels for Drug _education_, Hate speech _education_, Pornography _education_, etc. ? Urban legend says the Eskimos have 100 words for snow, it's not true... but I think that it is true that for the Wiki(p|m)edia projects we really do need 10 million words for education. Using a third party labelling system we can also expect issues that would arise where we fail to correctly apply the labels, either due to vandalism, limitations of the community process, or simply because of a genuine and well founded difference of opinion. Instead I prefer that we run our own labelling system. By controlling it ourselves we determine its meaning— avoiding terminology disputes without outsiders; we can operate the system in a manner which inhibits its usefulness to the involuntary censorship of adults (e.g. not actually putting the label data in the pages users view in an accessible way, creating site TOS which makes the involuntary application of our filters on adults unlawful), and maximizes its usefulness for user self determination by making the controls available right on the site. The wikimedia sites have enough traffic that its worth peoples time to customize their own preferences. There are many technical ways in which such a system could be constructed, some requiring more development work than others, and while I'd love to blather on a possible methods the important point at this time is to establish the principles before we worry about the tools. I agree and prefer a system designed for the special needs of WMF wikis and our global community. We may take some design elements and underlying concepts from existing systems, but
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
This is the first step towards censorship, and we should not take it. We have no experience or expertise to determine what content is suitable for particular users, or how content can be classified as such.Further, doing so is contrary to the basic principle that we do not perform original research or draw conclusions on disputed matters, but present the facts and outside opinions and leave the implication for the readers to decide. This principle has served us well in dealing with many disputes which in other settings are intractable. What we do have expertise and experience in is classifying our content by subject. We have a complex system of categories, actively maintained, and a system for determining correct titles and other metadata that reflect the content of the article. No user wants to see all of Wikipedia--they all choose what the see on the basis of these descriptors, and on the basis of external links to our site, links that are not under our control. They can choose on various grounds. They can choose by title, by links from another article, by inclusion in a category. Anyone who wishes to use this information to provide a selected version of WP can freely do so. To a certain extent , we also have visible metadata about the format of our material: the main ones which are easily present to visitors are the language, the size, and the type of computer file. There is other material that we could display,such as whether an article contains other files of particular types (in this context, images), or references, on external links. We could display a separate list of the images in an article, including their descriptions. We could include this in our search criteria. They would be useful for many purposes; someone might for example wish to see all articles on southeast Asia that contain maps, or wish to see articles about people only if they contain photographs of the subjects. This is broadly useful information, that can be used in many ways. it could easily be used to design an external filter than would, for example, display articles on people that contain photographs with the descriptors in place of the photographs, while displaying photographs in all other articles. The question is whether we should design such filters as part of the project. I think we should not take that step. We should leave it to outside services, which might for example work by viewing WP through a site that contains the desired filters, or by using a browser that incorporates them. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:17 PM, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 2:34 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:24 AM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- Dear reader at FOSI, As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions. Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous I am strongly in favour of allowing our users to choose what they see. If you don't like it, don't look at it is only useful advice when it's easy to avoid looking at things— and it isn't always on our sites. By marking up our content better and providing the right software tools we could _increase_ choice for our users and that can only be a good thing. I agree and I'm in favor of WMF allocating resources in order to develop a system that allows users to filter content based on the particular needs of their setting. At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the EFF and the ALA, I am opposed to these organized content labelling systems. These systems are primary censorship systems and are overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these systems to content providers and politicians. (For more information on the current state of compulsory filtering in the US I recommend the filing in Bradburn v. North Central Regional Library District an ongoing legal battle over a library system refusing to allow adult patrons to bypass the censorware in order to access constitutionally protected speech, in apparent violation of the suggestion by the US Supreme Court that the ability to bypass these filters is what made the filters lawful in the first place http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/washington/waedce/2:2006cv00327/41160/40/0.pdf ) It's arguable if we should fight against the censorship of factual information to adults or merely play no role in it— but it isn't really acceptable to assist it. And even when not used as a method
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Greg Maxwell writes: At the same time, and I think we'll hear a similar message from the EFF and the ALA, I am opposed to these organized content labelling systems. These systems are primary censorship systems and are overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will. I'm sure these groups will gladly confirm this for us, regardless of the sales patter used to sell these systems to content providers and politicians. I just want to chime in, in support of Greg's assessment here. I worked for EFF for nine years, and I have done extensive work with ALA as well, and I am absolutely certain that these organizations (and others, including civil-liberties groups) will be extremely critical if any project adopts ICRA labeling schemes. Moreover, Greg's characterization of the existing systems as primary censorship systems ... overwhelmingly used to subject third parties, often adults, to restrictions against their will is entirely accurate. --Mike ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On 9 May 2010 21:17, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: The tags applied should be clear and fact-based. So instead of tagging a page as containing pornography, which is entirely subjective, we should rather tag the page as contains a depiction of an erect penis or contains a depiction of oral intercourse. We can do this with the existing category system. The objection of the objectors will remain that the material is present at all. No system of categorisation will alleviate this concern - only actual censorship of Commons will. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On 9 May 2010 21:28, Mikemoral mikemoral...@gmail.com wrote: By why censor Commons? Should educational material be freely viewed and, of course, be made free to read, use, etc. Well, yes. The apparent reason is that Fox News is making trouble. Categorisation, labeling, etc. won't fix that - only removing the material would. This does not make it a good idea. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
*That's true. But at the moment we have nothing to defend or excuse ourselves with. If we had decent tagging we could at least say: You don't want your pupils to see nude people? Add rule XYZ to your school's proxy servers and Wikipedia will be clean. You can even choose which content should be allowed and which not. Much better than saying: You don't want your pupils to see nude people? No way! No Wikipedia without dicks and titties! Except you block all of Wikipedia...* If we create a content rating system, it should be based upon individual account settings which are decided by the editors themselves instead of being enforced globally. I am very much against any system that takes control away from the editor and hands it to some external party; We are not aiming to become another Golden Shield Projecthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Projectwhere a handful of people can dictate what content is appropriate for its audience. Even a system that sets top level permissions which are overridable trough account settings is to much in my eyes, as such systems can easily be abused. Equally i don't believe it is up to a school or ISP to decide whether or not they want to show certain content to its subscribers. If i don't want to see sexual images, nudity, the face of Muhammad, evolution or religious related content i should not be searching for it on the first place. A setting that allows people to filter content is little more then a courtesy to them as we would allow them to filter based upon their personal convictions. However, there is no way my ISP can decide what convictions i should follow. If a school decides to block Wikipedia altogether then i would say it is their loss, not ours. ~Excirial On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 10:42 PM, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: David Gerard hett schreven: On 9 May 2010 21:17, Marcus Buck m...@marcusbuck.org wrote: The tags applied should be clear and fact-based. So instead of tagging a page as containing pornography, which is entirely subjective, we should rather tag the page as contains a depiction of an erect penis or contains a depiction of oral intercourse. We can do this with the existing category system. That is possible but it will either be hacky or we'll need to be much more strict with our categorization (atomic categorization). I'm not opposed though. The objection of the objectors will remain that the material is present at all. No system of categorisation will alleviate this concern - only actual censorship of Commons will. That's true. But at the moment we have nothing to defend or excuse ourselves with. If we had decent tagging we could at least say: You don't want your pupils to see nude people? Add rule XYZ to your school's proxy servers and Wikipedia will be clean. You can even choose which content should be allowed and which not. Much better than saying: You don't want your pupils to see nude people? No way! No Wikipedia without dicks and titties! Except you block all of Wikipedia... Our current strategy is censoring, but hiding the censorship under most possibly vague and undefined terms like scope. Marcus Buck User:Slomox ___ 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] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
This message was an attempt to gain information and spur discussion about the system in general, it's limits and effectiveness, not wether or not we should actually do it. I was trying to gather more information so that we can have an informed debate if it ever got to discussing about the possibility of using ratings. That is why it was addressed to FOSI and cc'ed to some parties that might have clue about such systems. The copy to foundation-l was a courtesy message. You are welcome to discuss censorship and your opinion about it, but I would appreciate it even more if people actually talked about rating systems. DJ On 9 mei 2010, at 15:24, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- Dear reader at FOSI, As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions. Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous problems, because for the first time, a largely uncensored system has to work in the boundaries of a world that is largely censored. For libraries and schools this means that they want to provide Wikipedia and its related projects to their readers, but are presented with the problem of what some people might consider, information that is not child-safe. They have several options in that case, either blocking completely or using context aware filtering software that may make mistakes, that can cost some of these institutions their funding. Similar problems are starting to present themselves in countries around the world, differing views about sexuality between northern and southern europe for instance. Add to that the censoring of images of Muhammad, Tiananman square, the Nazi Swastika, and a host of other problems. Recently there has been concern that all this all-out-censoring of content by parties around the world is damaging the education mission of the Wikipedia related projects because so many people are not able to access large portions of our content due to a small (think 0.01% ) part of our other content. This has led some people to infer that perhaps it is time to rate the content of Wikipedia ourselves, in order to facilitate external censoring of material, hopefully making the rest of our content more accessible. According to statements around the web ICRA ratings are probably the most widely supported rating by filtering systems. Thus we were thinking of adding autogenerated ICRA RDF tags to each individual page describing the rating of the page and the images contained within them. I have a few questions however, both general and technical. 1: If I am correctly informed, Wikipedia would be the first website of this size to label their content with ratings, is this correct? 2: How many content filters understand the RDF tags 3: How many of those understand multiple labels and path specific labeling. This means: if we rate the path of images included on the page different from the page itself, do filters block the entire content, or just the images ? (Consider the Virgin Killer album cover on the Virgin Killer article, if you are aware of that controversial image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer) 4: Do filters understand per page labeling ? Or do they cache the first RDF file they encounter on a website and use that for all other pages of the website ? 5: Is there any chance the vocabulary of ICRA can be expanded with new ratings for non-Western world sensitive issues ? 6: Is there a possibility of creating a separate namespace that we could potentially use for our own labels ? I hope that you can help me answer these questions, so that we may continue our community debate with more informed viewpoints about the possibilities of content rating. If you have additional suggestions for systems or problems that this web-property should account for, I would more than welcome those suggestions as well. Derk-Jan Hartman ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Hi Derk-Jan, Thank you for starting this thread. There is obviously a range of options -- let's say, on a 10-point scale, ranging from 0 (do nothing but enforce existing policy) to 10 (completely purge everything that's potentially objectionable to anyone, anywhere). Somewhere on that continuum are possibilities like i) we tag pages so that external entities can filter, ii) we point parents towards content filtering systems they can use, but make no changes ourselves, iii) we implement our own filtering system so that people can choose to hide objectionable content if they want, or iv) we implement our own filtering system, with a default to a safe or moderate view and the option for people to change their own settings. Those are just a few: there are lots of options. (e.g., Google Images and Flickr I believe do different versions of option iv. I'm not saying that means we should do the same; it does not necessarily mean that.) I would love to see a table of various options, with pros and cons including feedback from folks like EFF. If anyone feels like starting such a thing, I would be really grateful :-) Thanks, Sue On 9 May 2010 14:26, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.com wrote: This message was an attempt to gain information and spur discussion about the system in general, it's limits and effectiveness, not wether or not we should actually do it. I was trying to gather more information so that we can have an informed debate if it ever got to discussing about the possibility of using ratings. That is why it was addressed to FOSI and cc'ed to some parties that might have clue about such systems. The copy to foundation-l was a courtesy message. You are welcome to discuss censorship and your opinion about it, but I would appreciate it even more if people actually talked about rating systems. DJ On 9 mei 2010, at 15:24, Derk-Jan Hartman wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- Dear reader at FOSI, As a member of the Wikipedia community and the community that develops the software on which Wikipedia runs, I come to you with a few questions. Over the past years Wikipedia has become more and more popular and omnipresent. This has led to enormous problems, because for the first time, a largely uncensored system has to work in the boundaries of a world tha t is largely censored. For libraries and schools this means that they want to provide Wikipedia and its related projects to their readers, but are presented with the problem of what some people might consider, information that is not child-safe. They have several options in that case, either blocking completely or using context aware filtering software that may make mistakes, that can cost some of these institutions their funding. Similar problems are starting to present themselves in countries around the world, differing views about sexuality between northern and southern europe for instance. Add to that the censoring of images of Muhammad, Tiananman square, the Nazi Swastika, and a host of other problems. Recently there has been concern that all this all-out-censoring of content by parties around the world is damaging the education mission of the Wikipedia related projects because so many people are not able to access large portions of our content due to a small (think 0.01% ) part of our other content. This has led some people to infer that perhaps it is time to rate the content of Wikipedia ourselves, in order to facilitate external censoring of material, hopefully making the rest of our content more accessible. According to statements around the web ICRA ratings are probably the most widely supported rating by filtering systems. Thus we were thinking of adding autogenerated ICRA RDF tags to each individual page describing the rating of the page and the images contained within them. I have a few questions however, both general and technical. 1: If I am correctly informed, Wikipedia would be the first website of this size to label their content with ratings, is this correct? 2: How many content filters understand the RDF tags 3: How many of those understand multiple labels and path specific labeling. This means: if we rate the path of images included on the page different from the page itself, do filters block the entire content, or just the images ? (Consider the Virgin Killer album cover on the Virgin Killer article, if you are aware of that controversial image http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer) 4: Do filters understand per page labeling ? Or do they cache the first RDF file they encounter on a website and use that for all other pages of the website ? 5: Is there any chance the vocabulary of ICRA can be expanded with new ratings for non-Western world sensitive issues ? 6: Is there a possibility of creating a separate namespace that we could potentially use for our
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: This *HAS* been suggested before, and soundly defeated. Nothing has changed in this respect. I would heartfeltly ask that folks just quit trying to stuff this down the throat of a community that simply does not content labeling. I don't see why the negative emphasis here. Without taking a side about any particular types of imagery, labelling should be regarded as metadata. Ideally, all media should be described by text, which should be regarded as simply another dimension by which people can find media they want. The end user can deal with images as they like, through semantic searching or through content filtering. -Stevertigo ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
*That is why it was addressed to FOSI and cc'ed to some parties that might have clue about such systems. The copy to foundation-l was a courtesy message. You are welcome to discuss censorship and your opinion about it, but I would appreciate it even more if people actually talked about rating systems.* Very well, lets see if i can write up some something more on the point then: *Definition and purpose*: The purpose of such a system would be to allow certain content to be filtered from public view. The scope of such a project is discussable, and dependent upon the goals we wish to reach. *Rating System*: In order to decide a contents category and offensiveness there has to be a method to sort the images. Multiple options are available: *Categorization:* Categories could be added to images to establish the subject of an image. For example, one image might be categorized nudity, the other might be categorized as sexual intercourse and so on. The categorization could be similar to the way we categorize our stub templates - we could create a top-level filter for Nudity and create more specific categories under that. That way it is possible to fine-tune the content one might not wish to see. *Rating:* Another method is rating each image. Instead of using a category tree we might use a system that allows users to set a level of explicitness or severity for each image. An image which shows non sexual nudity would be rated lower then an image which shows a high level of nudity. Note that such a system would require a clear set of rules as a rating might be subject to ones personal idea's and feelings towards a certain subject. *Control mechanism*:There are various levels at which we can filter content: *Organization wide:* An organization wide filter would allow an organization to block content based upon site-wide settings. Techically this would likely prove to be the more difficult option to implement as it would require both local and external changes. There are multiple methods to execute this though. For example a server may rely a certain value to Wikipedia at the start of each session detailing the content that should not be forwarded over this connection. Based on such a value the server could be programmed in such a way that images of a certain category won't be forwarded, or would be replaced by placeholders. The advantage of this method is that it allows organizations such as schools to control which content should be shown, therefor possibly negating complete blocks of Wikipedia. The negative is that it takes away control from the user. *Par-user:* A second method is allowing par-user settings. Such a system would be easier to build and integrate as it only requires changes on wikipedia's side. A seperate section could be made under My preferences which would include a set of check boxes where a user could select which content he or she prefers not to see. Images falling under a certain category could be replaced with the images alt text or with an image stating something akin to Par your preferences, this image was removed. *Hybrid*: A hybrid system could integrate both systems. A user might override or increase organization level settings if he or she has personal preferences. *Possible concerns* *Responsibility and vandalism: *One risk with rating systems is that they might be abused for personal goals, akin to article vandalism. Therefor there should be some limit on who can rate an image - anonymous rating could change images in such a way that they may be visible or invisible to people who might or might not want this. *Volunteer interest:* Implementing such a system would likely require a lot of volunteer activity. Not only has every image to be checked and rated, we would also have a backlog of over 6 million images to rate. Therefor we should have sufficient volunteers who are interested in such a system. *Public interest*: Plain and simple: Will people actually use this system? Will people be content with their ability to filter, or will they still try to remove images they deem offensive? Also: How many editors would use this system? *Implementation area*: Commons only? Local and commons? That is all i can think of for now. I hope it is somewhat more constructive towards the point you were initially trying to relay :) ~Excirial On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hart...@gmail.comwrote: This message was an attempt to gain information and spur discussion about the system in general, it's limits and effectiveness, not wether or not we should actually do it. I was trying to gather more information so that we can have an informed debate if it ever got to discussing about the possibility of using ratings. That is why it was addressed to FOSI and cc'ed to some parties that might have clue about such systems. The copy to foundation-l was a courtesy message. You are welcome to discuss censorship and your opinion about it, but I would appreciate it even more if
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
I can think of other concerns. The main one is that of our competence to form judgements. On some things we can: though nudity would seem something obvious, deciding on the various degrees of it is not: I do not think we are likely to agree on whether any particular nude image is primarily sexual,m or primarily non-sexual. If we tried to be precise, we would degenerate towards a situation like some legal codes which state exactly what portions of a female breast may be displayed in a particular context, or in just what way something must be covered to make it non-nude. Further, though I consider it essential that Commons should include appropriately educational sexual and even pornographic content, I do not think it should concentrate on that; important though education about human sexuality is, there are other things to educate about also, many just as much dependent upon images. A project to minutely categorize pages on sexuality would concentrate much of the volunteer effort on this portion of the contents. We need some editors who want to work on this field primarily, but we do not need everybody. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 6:26 PM, Excirial wp.excir...@gmail.com wrote: *That is why it was addressed to FOSI and cc'ed to some parties that might have clue about such systems. The copy to foundation-l was a courtesy message. You are welcome to discuss censorship and your opinion about it, but I would appreciate it even more if people actually talked about rating systems.* Very well, lets see if i can write up some something more on the point then: *Definition and purpose*: The purpose of such a system would be to allow certain content to be filtered from public view. The scope of such a project is discussable, and dependent upon the goals we wish to reach. *Rating System*: In order to decide a contents category and offensiveness there has to be a method to sort the images. Multiple options are available: *Categorization:* Categories could be added to images to establish the subject of an image. For example, one image might be categorized nudity, the other might be categorized as sexual intercourse and so on. The categorization could be similar to the way we categorize our stub templates - we could create a top-level filter for Nudity and create more specific categories under that. That way it is possible to fine-tune the content one might not wish to see. *Rating:* Another method is rating each image. Instead of using a category tree we might use a system that allows users to set a level of explicitness or severity for each image. An image which shows non sexual nudity would be rated lower then an image which shows a high level of nudity. Note that such a system would require a clear set of rules as a rating might be subject to ones personal idea's and feelings towards a certain subject. *Control mechanism*:There are various levels at which we can filter content: *Organization wide:* An organization wide filter would allow an organization to block content based upon site-wide settings. Techically this would likely prove to be the more difficult option to implement as it would require both local and external changes. There are multiple methods to execute this though. For example a server may rely a certain value to Wikipedia at the start of each session detailing the content that should not be forwarded over this connection. Based on such a value the server could be programmed in such a way that images of a certain category won't be forwarded, or would be replaced by placeholders. The advantage of this method is that it allows organizations such as schools to control which content should be shown, therefor possibly negating complete blocks of Wikipedia. The negative is that it takes away control from the user. *Par-user:* A second method is allowing par-user settings. Such a system would be easier to build and integrate as it only requires changes on wikipedia's side. A seperate section could be made under My preferences which would include a set of check boxes where a user could select which content he or she prefers not to see. Images falling under a certain category could be replaced with the images alt text or with an image stating something akin to Par your preferences, this image was removed. *Hybrid*: A hybrid system could integrate both systems. A user might override or increase organization level settings if he or she has personal preferences. *Possible concerns* *Responsibility and vandalism: *One risk with rating systems is that they might be abused for personal goals, akin to article vandalism. Therefor there should be some limit on who can rate an image - anonymous rating could change images in such a way that they may be visible or invisible to people who might or might not want this. *Volunteer interest:* Implementing such a system would likely
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 1:04 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Derk-Jan Hartman wrote: This message is CC'ed to other people who might wish to comment on this potential approach --- You asked for comments... Here is one we prepared earlier... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_censorship#ICRA That was on English Wikipedia, a very long time ago. The current discussion is about Commons, and affects other projects where there is less editorial input to ensure the content is educational. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
Sue Gardner wrote: Hi Derk-Jan, Thank you for starting this thread. There is obviously a range of options -- let's say, on a 10-point scale, ranging from 0 (do nothing but enforce existing policy) to 10 (completely purge everything that's potentially objectionable to anyone, anywhere). Somewhere on that continuum are possibilities like i) we tag pages so that external entities can filter, ii) we point parents towards content filtering systems they can use, but make no changes ourselves, iii) we implement our own filtering system so that people can choose to hide objectionable content if they want, or iv) we implement our own filtering system, with a default to a safe or moderate view and the option for people to change their own settings. Those are just a few: there are lots of options. (e.g., Google Images and Flickr I believe do different versions of option iv. I'm not saying that means we should do the same; it does not necessarily mean that.) I would love to see a table of various options, with pros and cons including feedback from folks like EFF. If anyone feels like starting such a thing, I would be really grateful :-) Hi Sue, Is it okay if I first explain why none of the examples you mention are a good fit for us; and then pull a rabbit out of my hat, and explain how one of them can be salvaged and made into an excellent system? Rating by level is fixed, and it will never be culturally sensitive. And on wikipedia no matter how it is rigged people who edit will just get frustrated for both the right and the wrong reasons. Using words like safe etc, will certainly offend cultures, which are very very strict, for instance in terms how much flesh can be seen of women. Pointing parents to systems of filtering, that is half a solution, and the problem would be we would have to keep vetting what the filtering systems are basing their filtering, so our site doesn't look ridiculous in some form or another, either accidentally failing and offending the viewer (ask me sometime, I have tales to tell), or going to the other extreme, and leaving the viewer without a perfectly nice result. The last problem, but certainly not the least one. All of these are a *hard* *sell*. They are a hard sell to the wikimedian community. They are also a hard sell to a huge sector of our readers, and those who love us, even enough to give us small donations. Our community must matter to us, our readers must matter to us, those who love us should matter to us, and well, those who give us small donations -- I am not in a place to tell how much they matter to us. So now we come to the rabbit time!!! (DRUM-ROLL PLEASE!) If it is a hard sell, find a way to soften it, without forcing the issue. How? First, be very canny about how the tags are named. Tits vs. Breasts, Butt vs. Rear-end, Baretits vs. Topless and so forth. Second do *not* limit the tags to such content tags which are useful for _avoiding_ content, but add in also positive tags (I know, for some all those above are positive tags ;-) puppies, kittens, funny, horsies, etc. I am sure someone can think of even better and smoother tagnames. But teh advantages of this approach are that it doesn't *feel* like censorship, but more like a value added service. I won't talk about how the system of selecting which stuff to see should be constructed, but I am sure someone has ideas. I do think though that the system should be reversible, that is essential to sell it not as censorship, so that those who only want to see naughty bits can do so, or for that matter somebody can see only cute animals. There is one additional benefit in terms of our community too. It is much more fun to add those kinds of tags, and much less drudge-work. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Potential ICRA labels for Wikipedia
There is no general agreement here that any system of filtering for any purpose is ever necessary, and I think it is totally contrary to the entire general idea behind the the free culture movement. But people have liberty do do as they please with our content, and if someone wants to filter for their own purposes we cannot and should not prevent them. Neither should we assist them. For JV to suggest assisting censorship by doing something that will not feel like censorship is not in my opinion forthright. We should have good descriptors because that's part of the context for the images, but this should be decided without the least concern about anything other than finding the images a user might want to find. Agreed that one part of that is avoiding retrieving what they do not want to receive, but there are many such criteria, such as size, date, and the like. It can be argued that we have some responsibility to those of o users who can not access unfiltered content, but the least judgmental way is to provide ourselves for a option to display images as text descriptors only, rather than leave it to browsers--especially since a text-only view is appropriate for other purposes also. We could show the proper approach by working on better descriptors for more important things than sexual images first. The necessary distinctions for any filtering service that does aim at restricting concept in a way which is not grossly heavy handed would require very detailed separation of the various types of breast images, and I do not see why distinguishing between such things as the different degrees of nudity is all that important in an encyclopedic sense. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 11:23 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: Hi Derk-Jan, Thank you for starting this thread. There is obviously a range of options -- let's say, on a 10-point scale, ranging from 0 (do nothing but enforce existing policy) to 10 (completely purge everything that's potentially objectionable to anyone, anywhere). Somewhere on that continuum are possibilities like i) we tag pages so that external entities can filter, ii) we point parents towards content filtering systems they can use, but make no changes ourselves, iii) we implement our own filtering system so that people can choose to hide objectionable content if they want, or iv) we implement our own filtering system, with a default to a safe or moderate view and the option for people to change their own settings. Those are just a few: there are lots of options. (e.g., Google Images and Flickr I believe do different versions of option iv. I'm not saying that means we should do the same; it does not necessarily mean that.) I would love to see a table of various options, with pros and cons including feedback from folks like EFF. If anyone feels like starting such a thing, I would be really grateful :-) Hi Sue, Is it okay if I first explain why none of the examples you mention are a good fit for us; and then pull a rabbit out of my hat, and explain how one of them can be salvaged and made into an excellent system? Rating by level is fixed, and it will never be culturally sensitive. And on wikipedia no matter how it is rigged people who edit will just get frustrated for both the right and the wrong reasons. Using words like safe etc, will certainly offend cultures, which are very very strict, for instance in terms how much flesh can be seen of women. Pointing parents to systems of filtering, that is half a solution, and the problem would be we would have to keep vetting what the filtering systems are basing their filtering, so our site doesn't look ridiculous in some form or another, either accidentally failing and offending the viewer (ask me sometime, I have tales to tell), or going to the other extreme, and leaving the viewer without a perfectly nice result. The last problem, but certainly not the least one. All of these are a *hard* *sell*. They are a hard sell to the wikimedian community. They are also a hard sell to a huge sector of our readers, and those who love us, even enough to give us small donations. Our community must matter to us, our readers must matter to us, those who love us should matter to us, and well, those who give us small donations -- I am not in a place to tell how much they matter to us. So now we come to the rabbit time!!! (DRUM-ROLL PLEASE!) If it is a hard sell, find a way to soften it, without forcing the issue. How? First, be very canny about how the tags are named. Tits vs. Breasts, Butt vs. Rear-end, Baretits vs. Topless and so forth. Second do *not* limit the tags to such content tags which are useful for _avoiding_ content, but add in also positive tags (I know, for some all those above are positive tags ;-) puppies, kittens, funny, horsies, etc. I am sure someone
