I'm pretty sure that the community is against a filter system based on our commons categories. Those who oppose that type of scheme range from the idealists who are opposed to censorship in principle to the pragmatists who are aware of our categorisation backlog and don't want to set us up to fail (or to implement something that would undermine our GLAM programs). Thankfully the Foundation seems to have taken that message on board and though we can expect to continue to have pro-filter people joining the debate and trying to revive that type of proposal, I'm pretty sure it is dead in the water.
I'm not sure that we have a consensus for or against the principle of censorship, or whether the community as a whole regards a private personal filter as censorship. The "referendum" could have established if we have such consensus, but it didn't include the right questions. I suspect that I'm not unusual in opposing more censorship than we already have in our somewhat misnamed "not censored" policy, but also in regarding censorship as one person stopping another from seeing or hearing something. To my mind censorship starts when someone tells me I can't have certain images or information, if I choose not to see certain things that's my choice and not something I consider censorship, but I don't know what proportion of the community shares my view on that. This question raises two contentious areas; On the one hand at least one Wikimedian is asserting that the community is opposed to censorship in principle, and that even a private personal filter would be censorship. On the other hand the board still wants the image filter to be usable for IPs and not just logged in users - despite the fact that we have no way to implement an IP level system without allowing some people to censor other people's Wikimedia viewing. Another contentious area exists re NPOV and globalisation. Some other websites have a clear POV and a focus on a particular culture, and for them a filter is relatively easy. "Not Safe for Work" is probably quite similar in Peoria, Portsmouth and Perth and such a filter prudish but not totally alien to many Europeans. But in some parts of the world cultural concerns are very different, so different that the idea of a simple single filter or even a complex filter with a sliding scale from burka to bare naked via swim wear isn't enough. To comply with NPOV and offer a filter that could potentially work for everybody we need a multiplex system that allows for the possibility that two different people could share a distaste for one image but have completely opposite perceptions of another image. The initial WMF proposal only supported a limited number of filters and therefore inevitably would have lead to POV disputes as to which religions or filter concerns were important enough to be on the list and which the community would ignore and deem insufficiently important to merit a filter option. Both of the filter options in play - the personal filter option and the personal private filter option are based on the idea that you can have as many different filter options as you want - the distinguishing issue is whether there are people who want a particular filter not whether the movement decides whether a particular filter request is valid or not. However one of the leading proposals is that we promote the practice of collapsing contentious images that already operates on two languages and encourage it elsewhere on Wikipedia. The problem is that you can't have a policy of allowing "controversial" images to be collapsed without setting a threshold as to how controversial an image needs to be to merit such action. If you simply allow anyone to collapse any image they find offensive then our Political coverage will quickly look odd. If you decide to only collapse and hide images that have been reported to be controversial by reliable sources then brace yourself for various demonstrations at every future Wikimania. The third contentious area is over the publishing of lists that could assist censors. Tom Morris has argued that we shouldn't concern ourselves with that, in effect citing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Other_stuff_exists and explaining that the horse has bolted. Not everyone accepts that argument, and I see this as a major difference between the personal filter option and the private personal filter option http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Brainstorming/personal_private_filters. Though I'm wondering whether a compromise between the two with seeding lists would be acceptable providing they were not comprehensive lists. A fourth area of contention is money and specifically whether this is a legitimate use of the money donated to the movement. We've already had one UK board member ask awkward question re this. My view is that one could argue that a private personal filter is a user preference and within scope; That a filter which made the projects acceptable to large numbers of people who currently avoid us would be in scope; and that a filter which cost a tiny proportion of our total budget could be de minimis. But others disagree and at present we have no idea as to what these filters would cost or how many non-users are just waiting for such a filter. Part of that could be answered by an estimate from the developers, part by doing research amongst the internet users who don't use Wikimedia in languages where we have low readership share. But radically the board could resolve this by setting up a stand alone organisation to fund the global image filter. If that couldn't fundraise then we'd have an idea of the value of the concept, and it might be salutary for the board itself to organise such a fork and then have to collaborate with it. WSC > It isn' one incidence, it isn't a class of incidences. Take it on board > that the > community is against the *principle* of censorship. Please. > > > -- > -- > Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] > > > > ------------------------------ > > Message: 8 > Date: Thu, 1 Dec 2011 19:06:50 +0000 > From: Tom Morris <t...@tommorris.org> > Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Image filter brainstorming: Personal > filter lists > To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List > <foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > Message-ID: > <CAAQB2S88_o=poBAE-mx28jYr=f0uih9zxre1kd9hmcishc3...@mail.gmail.com > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 > > On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 09:11, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen > <cimonav...@gmail.com> wrote: > > This is not a theoretical risk. This has happened. Most famously in > > the case of Virgin using pictures of persons that were licenced under > > a free licence, in their advertising campaign. I hesitate to call this > > argument fatuous, but it's relevance is certainly highly > > questionable. Nobody has raised this is as a serious argument except > > you assume it > > has been. This is the bit that truly is a straw horse. The "downstream > > use" objection > > was *never* about downstream use of _content_ but downstream use of > _labels_ and > > the structuring of the semantic data. That is a real horse of a > > different colour, and not > > of straw. > > > > I was drawing an analogy: the point I was making is very simple - the > general principle of "we shouldn't do X because someone else might > reuse it for bad thing Y" is a pretty lousy argument, given that we do > quite a lot of things in the free culture/open source software world > that have the same problem. Should the developers of Hadoop worry that > (your repressive regime of choice) might use their tools to more > efficiently sort through surveillance data of their citizens? > > I'm not at all sure how you concluded that I was suggesting filtering > groups would be reusing the content? Net Nanny doesn't generally need > to include copies of Autofellatio6.jpg in their software. The reuse of > the filtering category tree, or even the unstructured user data, is > something anti-filter folk have been concerned about. But for the most > part, if a category tree were built for filtering, it wouldn't require > much more than identifying clusters of categories within Commons. That > is the point of my post. If you want to find adult content to filter, > it's pretty damn easy to do: you can co-opt the existing extremely > detailed category system on Commons ("Nude images including Muppets", > anybody?). > > Worrying that filtering companies will co-opt a new system when the > existing system gets them 99% of the way anyway seems just a little > overblown. > > > It isn' one incidence, it isn't a class of incidences. Take it on board > that > > the community is against the *principle* of censorship. Please. > > As I said in the post, there may still be good arguments against > filtering. The issue of principle may be very strong - and Kim Bruning > made the point about the ALA definition, for instance, which is a > principled rather than consequentialist objection. > > Generally, though, I don't particularly care *what* people think, I > care *why* they think it. This is why the debate over this has been so > unenlightening, because the arguments haven't actually flowed, just > lots of emotion and anger. > > -- > Tom Morris > <http://tommorris.org/> > > > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l