Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
Hi Ting, Thanks for explaining the position of the board in your own words. I appreciate the board is listening. I am concerned that you state that the board is acting from belief, I recommend you consider how this can move to proposing a strategy based on facts and non-controversial analysis. I suspect that any proposal for change will be strongly resisted and continue to divide our community until well understood and well communicated facts underpin the board's resolution rather than personal belief. Cheers, Fae ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
* Sue Gardner wrote: Please read Ting's note carefully. The Board is asking me to work with the community to develop a solution that meets the original requirements as laid out in its resolution. It is asking me to do something. But it is not asking me to do the specific thing that has been discussed over the past several months, and which the Germans voted against. There is nothing useful to be learned from the Letter to the Community. What we can assume is that someone on the Board raised the issue about people complaining about images, someone suggested if there are images people don't like, they should have the option to have them hidden from them, and then they agreed that someone should figure that out. Board members do not thing they have to contribute to the solution and they don't think the community should have any say in whether the feature is actually wanted by the community. Whoever is tasked with figuring this out isn't actually taking useful steps towards solving the problem. Instead we are burning goodwill by arguing the finer points of what is, exactly, censorship, how there are provocateurs in our midst, and how important, relative to not, it is that users have this feature whether they are logged in or not, and any number of other things. This is not an issue where you can hope to get everyone on board by appealing to people's empathy and understanding, people do not know whether they are to board the Titanic or the QE2, so you get a lot of talk about how the ship will sink if you build it incorrectly or steer it badly. It would be easy for the Board to resolve that at this point they ex- pect whoever they tasked with it to come up with a technical proposal in coordination with the community which might then be implemented on projects who volunteer to test it and then there will be an evaluation also in coordination with the community before any further steps are taken, for instance. But the Chair has chosen to instead inform the community that it's far too late to argue about this feature and there is no reason for the Board to do as little as hint at the possibility that this feature will not be imposed on projects by force. We can read the Letter to the Community carefully if you want. I note, e.g., deliberately offending or provoking them is not respectful, and is not okay. This is insinuating a notable group of people is taking the opposite position, which is not true. That part starts We believe we need, and should want, to treat readers with respect. Their opinions and preferences are as legitimate as our own. The list of opinions and preferences humans have held throughout history that today we would find abhorrent is very, very long. The majority of editors who responded to the referendum are not opposed to the feature. I do not see how one can have followed the discussion without running across the fact that this statement is regarded as invalid inference from the poll. Like I said, it does not really matter what he wrote, the people who've expressed concern about the filter do not care about random claims how the Board is listening and hearing and paying attention and wants us to work with you despite the Board being openly hostile towards the com- munity, whether it means to be or is just exceptionally bad at dealing with the community in a manner that is well received. What they want is that this issue goes away, whether that is by abandoning the project or a brilliant idea that nobody has thought of so far or whatever. Clearly an image filter can be developed and maintained. Having one has costs and benefits. It may well be that no filter can be developed such that the benefits outweigh the costs. Without knowing that it is not reasonable to command implementation of the filter. If this had been framed as some explorative feasibility and requirements gathering study with an open outcome and proposals sought, we would have a different kind of discussion. The Board is hoping there is a solution that will 1) enable readers to easily hide images they don't want to see, as laid out in the Board's resolution [1], while 2) being generally acceptable to editors. Maybe this will not be possible, but it's the goal. The Board definitely does not want a war with the community, and it does not want people to fork or leave the projects. The goal is a solution that's acceptable for everyone. Well, then the Board should not have commanded implementation before an idea what to implement had been developed, the development should not have happened way out of reach of the community, there should not have been a referendum without a proposal that enjoys some meaningful level of community support, the referndum should have asked more meaningful questions, and the whole thing should have been very clearly branded as an experiment participation in which will be genuinely optional. It'll be necessary to move a few steps back to re-synchronize with the rest of the community and move
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 10:12 PM, Bob the Wikipedian bobthewikiped...@gmail.com wrote: Since no one has explicitly come out and said exactly what the issue is here, I'll ask: *What exactly is harmful about an opt-in filter? *If it's opt-in, then you have the choice to not even enable it if you so choose. You don't have to use it; it'd just be an option in the preferences page or maybe even a link on the margin similar to the WikiBooks link I never use. Can another option or link you never click really hurt the world, or even an individual for that matter? Also, *an idea for how this could be implemented*: The big one is that just isn't one and all the people on the board and the executives are trying their hardest at trying their best at proposing to the community that they are acting in good faith, while being *viciously* in Bad Faith wrt to the community. Back off and lick your wounds would be a nice option. There are worse ones. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 09:19:40AM -0700, Sue Gardner wrote: The Board is hoping there is a solution that will 1) enable readers to easily hide images they don't want to see, as laid out in the Board's resolution [1], while 2) being generally acceptable to editors. Maybe this will not be possible, but it's the goal. Perfect. That's exactly what I was hoping for. It's a deal! :-) sincerely, Kim Bruning -- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
I'm all for it, too. Bob On 10/9/2011 6:31 PM, Kim Bruning wrote: On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 09:19:40AM -0700, Sue Gardner wrote: The Board is hoping there is a solution that will 1) enable readers to easily hide images they don't want to see, as laid out in the Board's resolution [1], while 2) being generally acceptable to editors. Maybe this will not be possible, but it's the goal. Perfect. That's exactly what I was hoping for. It's a deal! :-) sincerely, Kim Bruning ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 2:31 AM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote: On Sun, Oct 09, 2011 at 09:19:40AM -0700, Sue Gardner wrote: The Board is hoping there is a solution that will 1) enable readers to easily hide images they don't want to see, as laid out in the Board's resolution [1], while 2) being generally acceptable to editors. Maybe this will not be possible, but it's the goal. Perfect. That's exactly what I was hoping for. It's a deal! :-) sincerely, Kim Bruning And while they are at such good form, WMF might try out their skills at a square and compasses construction of making a circle the precise area of a square -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
Sue Gardner wrote: The Board is hoping there is a solution that will 1) enable readers to easily hide images they don't want to see, as laid out in the Board's resolution [1], while 2) being generally acceptable to editors. Maybe this will not be possible, but it's the goal. As I've noted in other threads, Board member Samuel Klein has publicly expressed support for the type of implementation discussed here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Image_filter_referendum/en/Categories#general_image_filter_vs._category_system or http://goo.gl/t6ly5 Given the absence of elements widely cited as problematic, I believe that something along these lines would be both feasible and generally acceptable to editors. David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 9:10 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: David Gerard wrote: On 9 October 2011 14:18, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 October 2011 13:55, Ting Chen tc...@wikimedia.org wrote: The majority of editors who responded to the referendum are not opposed to the feature. However, a significant minority is opposed. How do you know? The referendum didn't ask whether people were opposed or not. I fear this point will need restating every time someone claims the referendum shows support. I wonder what the image filter referendum results would have had to look like in order to get anything other than a rambling we march forward, unabated! letter from the Board. MZMcBride Hi MZM and all! Greetings from the end of a long -- but productive and inspiring -- meeting weekend. Marching forward unabated is not, in fact, what we are saying. The board, and individual members of the board, are quite aware of all of the criticisms from the vote and from the conversations on and off list -- believe me. This is not an official report on behalf of the board, but here is what we discussed doing: * not going ahead with the category-based design that was proposed in the mockups; it is clear there are too many substantive problems that have been raised with this. Although this design (or any other) was actually not specified in the resolution, it is obvious that many of the critical comments were about using categorization in particular, and we hear that. * we are asking the staff to explore alternative designs, e.g. for a way for readers to flag images for themselves, and collapse individual images. This isn't fixed yet because it shouldn't be: we need to have a further period of iterative community technical design. * not changing or revoking the Board resolution, because we do still think that there is a problem with our handling of potentially controversial content that needs to be addressed. We don't want to ignore the criticism, and we *also* don't want to ignore the positive comments from those who identified a problem and thought such a tool would be helpful and useful in addressing it. Our view is holistic. The Board discussed amending the resolution (we think, in particular, that the word 'filter' has led to many assumptions about design), but decided that for now the language of the resolution is broad enough that it leaves room for alternative solutions. And we also do not want to ignore the rest of the resolution -- the parts that call for better tools for commons, and that lay out that we respect the principle of least astonishment. The speculation on this list the last few weeks about what individual board members think and want has generally been wildly, hilariously off base -- I have seen many statements about board member motivations that couldn't have been more wrong -- but so has the speculation that we don't care and have not been paying attention. My own views on whether a filter as proposed is workable have changed over the past couple of months. I appreciate especially the reasoned comments I have seen from people who have taken the time to think it through and who have wondered if a design as proposed would even work for readers, or would be implementable. And I have been gratified to see people dig up things like library statements of principle; as foundational documents these are a good place to start from (as someone who has always seen herself as a free speech advocate inside and outside of the library world, this tactic has made me glad, even if we may differ on interpretation). I also am glad for those comments that took the time to look critically at the vote process -- we did make a lot of mistakes, but we did learn a lot, and I hope with the help of all of this input we can do a better job next time we have a broad-scale vote (did you know that this was the single largest participatory exercise in wikimedia's history? I could not have imagined that at the beginning of this summer). None of us on the board have any intention of being censors; that is no one's desire and within no one's tolerance. I do think the resolution principles (neutrality, principle of least astonishment) that we laid out as guidelines for the tool are still good, strong principles; and I wouldn't have voted for the resolution in the first place if I thought what we were proposing encompassed or enabled censorship. And what hasn't changed for me is the impetus behind the resolution: a desire to work on behalf of *both* the editing community and our broad (up to 7 billion!) community of readers, and a desire to get perspectives from outside our own sometimes narrow conversational community on the mailing lists and wikis. We know there are a lot of questions that have been resolved over the last few weeks about releasing vote data and so on that aren't addressed in this letter; we did not address everything in our board meeting either. As a board, we trust Sue to
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 6:13 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: The Board is hoping there is a solution that will 1) enable readers to easily hide images they don't want to see, as laid out in the Board's resolution [1], while 2) being generally acceptable to editors. Maybe this will not be possible, but it's the goal. As I've noted in other threads, Board member Samuel Klein has publicly expressed support for the type of implementation discussed here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Image_filter_referendum/en/Categories#general_image_filter_vs._category_system or http://goo.gl/t6ly5 Given the absence of elements widely cited as problematic, I believe that something along these lines would be both feasible and generally acceptable to editors. David Levy Given comments like this, it seems the contingent in support of filters is utterly and completely delusional. That proposal mitigates none of the valid objections to enabling other forces from just taking what we would be foolish enough to supply, and abusing the system to all its delight. Please come up with something more realistic. -- -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 14:55, Ting Chen tc...@wikimedia.org wrote: Dear Wikimedia community, First, I want to thank the 24,000 editors who participated in the Wikimedia Foundation's referendum on the proposed personal image hiding feature. We are particularly grateful to the nearly seven thousand people who took the time to write in detailed and thoughtful comments. Thank you. Although the Board did not commission the referendum (it was commissioned by our Executive Director), we have read the results and followed the discussions afterwards with great interest. We discussed them at our Board meeting in San Francisco, in October. We are listening, and we are hearing you. The referendum results show that there is significant division inside the Wikimedia community about the potential value and impact of an image hiding feature. many thanks, ting, for this thoughtful mail. since the beginning of the discussion i was wondering if it would be controversial to just give up on image filters. and since the beginning of the discussion i was wondering if its the foundations desired role to ignite controversial discussions within the community. and since the beginning of the discussion about image filters i was wondering if it would not be one additional thing distracting a part of the community, the developers, the chapters, the foundation, and the foundations board from listening to the world outside wikipedia, both with respect to contents, and technology. to give you an example: a single person, salman khan, was able to build a youtube channel containing a couple of thousand educational videos, subscribed nearly 200'000 times, and watched nearly a 100 million times. with a budget of a couple of 100'000 usd, maximum. despite questionable details (e.g. npov is missing completely) i find the quality of the videos impressingly good. additionally, there are others doing the same thing with even less budget. aggregators are developping around this ecosysytem as well. and everything without wikimedia foundation, whose vision is ..freely share in the sum of all knowledge, and whose mission is ... collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. partially this evolves right on wmf's doorsteps, in san francisco. knowing this vision and mission, and knowing the new projects were built up without any involvment of the wikimedia foundation, operating e.g. wikiversity, having 20 times the budget and 20-50 times the people, having a multiple thousand times the volunteers, this leaves me completely speachless some links: * http://khanacademy.org * http://youtube.com/watch?v=-ROhfKyxgCo * http://academicearth.org/lectures/gender-sex-linked-traits * http://academicearth.org/about/team * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement * http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision best regards, rupert. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content
On Mon, Oct 10, 2011 at 6:47 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 9:10 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: David Gerard wrote: On 9 October 2011 14:18, Thomas Dalton thomas.dal...@gmail.com wrote: On 9 October 2011 13:55, Ting Chen tc...@wikimedia.org wrote: The majority of editors who responded to the referendum are not opposed to the feature. However, a significant minority is opposed. How do you know? The referendum didn't ask whether people were opposed or not. I fear this point will need restating every time someone claims the referendum shows support. I wonder what the image filter referendum results would have had to look like in order to get anything other than a rambling we march forward, unabated! letter from the Board. MZMcBride Hi MZM and all! Greetings from the end of a long -- but productive and inspiring -- meeting weekend. Marching forward unabated is not, in fact, what we are saying. The board, and individual members of the board, are quite aware of all of the criticisms from the vote and from the conversations on and off list -- believe me. This is not an official report on behalf of the board, but here is what we discussed doing: * not going ahead with the category-based design that was proposed in the mockups; it is clear there are too many substantive problems that have been raised with this. Although this design (or any other) was actually not specified in the resolution, it is obvious that many of the critical comments were about using categorization in particular, and we hear that. * we are asking the staff to explore alternative designs, e.g. for a way for readers to flag images for themselves, and collapse individual images. This isn't fixed yet because it shouldn't be: we need to have a further period of iterative community technical design. * not changing or revoking the Board resolution, because we do still think that there is a problem with our handling of potentially controversial content that needs to be addressed. We don't want to ignore the criticism, and we *also* don't want to ignore the positive comments from those who identified a problem and thought such a tool would be helpful and useful in addressing it. Our view is holistic. The Board discussed amending the resolution (we think, in particular, that the word 'filter' has led to many assumptions about design), but decided that for now the language of the resolution is broad enough that it leaves room for alternative solutions. And we also do not want to ignore the rest of the resolution -- the parts that call for better tools for commons, and that lay out that we respect the principle of least astonishment. The speculation on this list the last few weeks about what individual board members think and want has generally been wildly, hilariously off base -- I have seen many statements about board member motivations that couldn't have been more wrong -- but so has the speculation that we don't care and have not been paying attention. My own views on whether a filter as proposed is workable have changed over the past couple of months. I appreciate especially the reasoned comments I have seen from people who have taken the time to think it through and who have wondered if a design as proposed would even work for readers, or would be implementable. And I have been gratified to see people dig up things like library statements of principle; as foundational documents these are a good place to start from (as someone who has always seen herself as a free speech advocate inside and outside of the library world, this tactic has made me glad, even if we may differ on interpretation). I also am glad for those comments that took the time to look critically at the vote process -- we did make a lot of mistakes, but we did learn a lot, and I hope with the help of all of this input we can do a better job next time we have a broad-scale vote (did you know that this was the single largest participatory exercise in wikimedia's history? I could not have imagined that at the beginning of this summer). None of us on the board have any intention of being censors; that is no one's desire and within no one's tolerance. I do think the resolution principles (neutrality, principle of least astonishment) that we laid out as guidelines for the tool are still good, strong principles; and I wouldn't have voted for the resolution in the first place if I thought what we were proposing encompassed or enabled censorship. And what hasn't changed for me is the impetus behind the resolution: a desire to work on behalf of *both* the editing community and our broad (up to 7 billion!) community of readers, and a desire to get perspectives from outside our own sometimes narrow conversational community on the mailing lists and wikis. We know there are a lot of questions that have been resolved over the last few weeks about releasing vote
