date:20110907

On 7 September 2011 09:15, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:

 We need to stop wasting time and energy on personal wishes of two
 Board members. As it isn't about removing the content, any solution is
 better than wasting willingness on one nonconstructive and decadent
 project. If that time and energy was spent on rewriting Parser, we
 would have WYSIWYG editor a year or two ago.


Although I broadly agree with the rest of your message, I disagree
with the Parser bit on the end - basically, the parser rewrite had to
pass muster with someone at Brion or Tim level, as there's not really
anyone else who would be able to say these bits of syntax are out
and have it stick; and since I suspect Tim would rather spork his eyes
out than read the words parser rewrite ever again, getting Brion in
to work on it was the only way to make it go forward. Developer effort
is not fungible in the face of politics :-)


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

2011-09-07 Thread M. Williamson

Wow, you pat yourself on the back more times in that e-mail than I ever
thought possible in a single message. So you think Wikinews is the greatest
thing, and that us outsiders know not what we are talking about and don't
have a right to an opinion since we're not full-time Wikinewsies? Great,
that doesn't solve any problems or get anybody anywhere, though.


2011/9/7 pi zero wn.pi.z...@gmail.com

 Having only a few hours ago been alerted to the existence of this thread,
 I'm afraid I'm rather overwhelmed by it.  Way too long to read.  I've
 glimpsed a number of false/misleading statements about en.wn in passing,
 but
 would probably spent all night properly locating them all, let alone
 attempting to answer them.  (Hm, there was something about Wikinews being a
 bureaucracy, and of course the post that started this thread...)  I'm also
 rather puzzled by the nature of this thread, which seems to be largely
 non-Wikinewsies discussing what they think about how the inner workings
 ought to be changed of a sister project whose *current* inner workings are
 probably more unfamiliar to ---for a non-random example--- Wikipedians than
 those of any other sister.  (I've spent three years studying it and am
 hopefully just about up to speed now.)

 However, in a general collegial spirit toward Wikimedians having a
 discussion (whyever they're doing that), I'll offer a few general remarks
 about en.wn.

 en.wn is a wiki at, roughly, the extreme opposite end of several spectra
 from en.wp.  To oversimplify (the only way I'll get anywhere in this),
 en.wn
 is just about as different a wiki from en.wp as it is possible for a wiki
 to
 be.  Note, there is nothing un-wiki about en.wn.  It's very wiki.  What it
 *isn't* is Wikipedian.  Some Wikipedians, I think, are actually kind of
 afraid of en.wn, because all wmf wikis are drive by idealism, and part of
 the idealism of Wikipedia is a belief in various rules of wiki dynamics
 that
 aren't the way en.wn works.  Volunteers driven by idealism naturally have a
 massive emotional investment in those ideals ---that's what makes idealism
 great for sister projects!--- and in this case it means these Wikipedians
 have a massive emotional investment in disbelieving in the way en.wn works.

 The thing is, Wikinews confronts boldly, every day for several years now,
 challenges of quality control that Wikipedia is glacially slowly being
 forced to sidle up to if it is to thrive on into the future.  These are
 *really difficult challenges*, and I'm kind of amazed by how well we're
 dealing with this stuff that Wikipedia isn't ready for yet.  Obviously
 Wikipedia will never be Wikinews, but... Wikinews is the vanguard, and
 Wikipedia will eventually benefit from things we're figuring out (very,
 very
 slowly, but that's hardly surprising).

 A note on a slightly different tack.  A comment I made in a private
 discussion a few days ago (among experienced Wikinewsies, about the inner
 workings of the project) ran something like this:
  I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
 university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as
 homework.
 Besides the somewhat incidental fact I'm proud of the project, there are
 two
 points of interest here.

 First, we do have a class of, I think, about thirty university journalism
 students currently submitting articles for review.  Yes, that can produce a
 glut on the review queue, which we're learning how to keep up with and not
 allow it to keep us from reviewing the best articles in reasonable time.
  Of
 course we *also* want to spend a significant amount of time reviewing the
 *worse* articles, because how can those authors improve without feedback?
 Tricky.  This also means an especially high number of failing article
 reviews.  Some of these students honestly don't get at first the concept of
 neutrality, or perhaps how to not plagiarize, or some other basic
 principle.  Last semester we were surprised by how many final-year
 journalism students had trouble with this stuff, and we didn't let up our
 standards for them, and from what we hear, the professor was *delighted*.
 That's apparently just what he wanted, and he's sent another class this
 semester to get some hard knocks from us.

 The second thing about this, I only figured out myself when I realized
 reviewing these student's work reminded me forcefully of my time as a
 teaching assistant.  That, plus the recent nomination of the Old English
 Wikipedia for closure.  Wmf is about education, and an argument in that
 nomination was that the purpose of a Wikipedia is to educate readers by
 providing them with information in their native language.  Well, I saw two
 fails in that: first, reading it is surely educational *about Old English*,
 and second, *contributing* to it is surely massively educational about Old
 English.  The idea that contributing is educational applies in spades to
 en.wn, obviously, or why would a professor be telling

[Foundation-l] reply to John Vandenberg's question re RCom and image filter

2011-09-07 Thread WereSpielChequers

To answer John Vandenberg's question about the image filter survey Was this
survey approved by the Research Committee?

RCOM collectively was not consulted, though individual RCOM members may have
been.

WereSpielChequers
--


 Message: 5
 Date: Wed, 7 Sep 2011 00:23:14 +1000
 From: John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com
 Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced
 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
 Message-ID:
CAO9U_Z5=GbrO6j=0vmmuhpw2p5pe_z_gptqyysh6lzn2red...@mail.gmail.com
 
 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

 On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:
  ...
  At Research committee list [1] there is ongoing discussion related to
  John Vanderberg's question Was this survey approved by the Research
  Committee? [2]. Research committee wasn't asked, of course (and
  WereSpielChequers is working on statement). Because, simply,
  politically motivated junk science requires implementation, not
  questions about validity of premises.
 
  [1]
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/rcom-l/2011-September/000327.html
  [2]
 http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2011-September/067889.html

 Thank you for pointing this out Milos.  I wasnt aware that RCom's
 email list is public.  That is good.

 This survey may not be feeding into scientific research publications,
 however the principles of human research ethics should still apply to
 any survey of the public, especially when conducted by organisations
 funded by the public.  The survey instruments used should be valid,
 and the survey results should be discard if the survey population was
 not satisfactory.

 --
 John Vandenberg




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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

2011-09-07 Thread Brian McNeil

I'm not about to re-subscribe to the waste of time that is foundation-l,
just to comment that Ilya's remarks are by-and-large correct.

Wikinews is not as successful as it should be due to the 800lb gorilla
that is Wikipedia. That's no reason to kill it off - especially
considering that many of those I'm informed are participating in this
little discussion have me, personally, at the top of their hit lists.
[If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out Tony1.]

Put your own house in order first, gentlemen.

Wikipedia *still* does not enforce their not a news site policy, and
it is an utter waste of time bringing such up; numerous selfish
Wikipedians reject efforts to direct news-writing efforts to Wikinews. I
neither know, nor care, if this is because they're incapable of writing
to the high quality standards Wikinews sets; or, because they prefer
their egos being stroked by Wikipedia's high page-hit counts on articles
where they wrote a dozen or less words.

Trying to roll Wikinews back into Wikipedia would be a disaster. There
are, as said, too many people who've been sitting, patiently, sharpening
knives in preparation to kill the red-headed stepchild of the WMF.
And, Wikipedia could never ever handle original reporting.

That Wikinews is, currently, being used for a second semester of course
assignments from an Australian university is - to me - a clear
indication that what we do is valid, and valuable.


Brian McNeil.
-- 
Email: brian.mcn...@wikinewsie.org
WikiMedia UK, interim Scottish coordinator/GLAM-MGS liaison.
Wikinews Accredited Reporter | Facts don't cease to be facts, but news ceases 
to be news.


On Tue, 2011-09-06 at 15:54 -0700, Ilya Haykinson wrote:
 In my opinion (as a one-time active Wikinews Bureaucrat, I helped
 drive forward many of the early site policies, though not including
 the new review regime), I think Wikinews problems run far deeper than
 the burden of reviews.
 
 
 At issue is the purpose of the project. Our early goals were to have
 a) a wiki structure that delivers b) an NPOV article base that is c)
 available under an open-content license allowing reuse. Of these
 three, I think we'd done pretty well by b) and c). We hadn't however,
 managed to attract a _growing_ user base to make a) really
 functional. 
 
 
 Unlike all other Wikimedia projects, Wikinews cannot succeed via
 slow-but-steady improvement. We can't add one article a day and over
 time build a site with 10,000 relevant articles: we'd still end up
 with a site that has only one relevant article and a ton of
 maybe-historically-useful archives. Thus, we would require a lot of
 people contributing and reviewing things in order to achieve
 constantly high throughput and retain relevance. 
 
 
 Unfortunately, Wikinews always had a problem with attracting a huge
 user base. We had to rely on a few hundred semi-active contributors,
 and maybe only a few dozen very committed people. We also would have a
 bunch of people who misunderstood the purpose of Wikinews and would
 post stories about their dogs, or biased rants, or things that were
 impossible to confirm given no sources (accident on corner of 4th and
 broadway, 3 people hurt). So our response was to focus on quality and
 process, rather than purely quantity. This meant that if a user showed
 up with a drive-by article creation -- dumping an article onto a page
 that was clearly not in the right shape to be published -- we would
 wait for someone to improve it. If nobody did, it got deleted or
 marked as abandoned.
 
 
 Imagine a Wikipedia in which every article makes it onto the homepage,
 immediately or within hours after creation. Either you have to have a
 lot of people to improve every article to some reasonable standards,
 or you need to have a process that requires high quality from the
 start but has a side-effect that restricts quantity. The latter is the
 direction in which Wikinews has headed over the last several years,
 and I think that's why we have always had (and continue having) people
 who're unable to publish legitimate stories: the process is just not
 optimized for this.
 
 
 My recommendation has been, for several years, to close Wikinews as an
 independent entity and add a News tab to Wikipedia. Just like Talk
 and main namespaces have different standards, the News namespace would
 follow Wikinews-like guidelines for what's acceptable. Articles would
 be closely tied to summary encyclopedic articles. It would be easy to
 create news summary pages. The (comparatively) huge number of
 Wikipedia editors would largely prevent low-quality articles from
 remaining in prominent positions. We could, thus, enable easy open
 editing capabilities. I continue strongly standing by this
 recommendation. I don't know whose call it would be to make this
 happen.
 
 
 I don't mean to discount the great successes of Wikinews to date.
 Nobody believed that it was possible to have a high-quality,
 community-contributed, _and_ generally-NPOV news source, and

Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews


 Wikipedia *still* does not enforce their not a news site policy, and
 it is an utter waste of time bringing such up; numerous selfish
 Wikipedians reject efforts to direct news-writing efforts to Wikinews. I
 neither know, nor care, if this is because they're incapable of writing
 to the high quality standards Wikinews sets; or, because they prefer
 their egos being stroked by Wikipedia's high page-hit counts on articles
 where they wrote a dozen or less words.


That's a rather negative view; I've been evangelising the idea of pushing
newsy/breaking content to WikiNews for some time - and encouraging people
contributing to high profile current events to consider WikiNews as a
more appropriately outlet. Wikipedia doesn't do current events very well -
our editorial process is unsuited to it, and we end up with problems
of recent-ism and undue weight (which take lengthy times to fix).

I've long suggested a moratorium on recording current events - and instead
leaving that job to our WikiNews colleagues...

HOWEVER

WikiNews is not simple to get into. That is a major problem. Even as an
experienced Wiki user who used to contribute to WN (some time ago) it was
hard to figure out the process of getting a piece of news from new page to
published. Most of the other people I push your way are similarly
discouraged.

So whilst I can only comment broadly on the internal editorial process, and
could well be wrong; I can comment on how approachable WN is as a project...
it's not awful, for sure, but it doesn't make it as easy as possible to
write an article. (FWIW just about every foundation project suffers the same
issue to some degree or another)

Several times I've cut unduely lengthy recent-event reportage from a WP
article and considered dropping by WN to set it up in a more appropriate
venue. But the time commitment to do so is discouraging.

So perhaps this is something to consider working on.


 Trying to roll Wikinews back into Wikipedia would be a disaster. There
 are, as said, too many people who've been sitting, patiently, sharpening
 knives in preparation to kill the red-headed stepchild of the WMF.
 And, Wikipedia could never ever handle original reporting.


Agreed - this is not a good idea or step. WP is unsuited to news.

Why does everything have to be a fight, we're all far too defensive of our
pet projects and initiatives; every time a piece of criticism comes up it is
blasted without much consideration... not good.

Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 1:05 PM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 18:04, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote:
  While I'm very interested in hearing the opinion of our current editors,
 I
  disagree that we will can collect and disseminate information in a
 neutral
  way to all the people of world if we continue to  listen solely to our
 core
  group of editors. Our current editors come from much too narrow a
  demographic group to think that we are making content decision that
  represent a global view.
 
  I realize that change is uncomfortable, but we must find ways to be more
  inclusive in order to achieve the WMF core mission.
 
  A WMF offered content filter is one way that we can reach people who
  otherwise would not be inclined to read or edit WMF projects. Although I
 may
  not necessarily agree with the viewing options of some of the people who
 use
  the filter, I respect their choice because I believe that they know
 better
  than me what is best for them.
 
  I strongly oppose any decision making process that does not look outside
 of
  WMF for ideas. The surest way for WMF to grow stagnant is to work in an
 echo
  chamber. And it is imperative for WMF staff, WMF Board, and WMF community
 to
  welcome diverse views in our discussions.
 
  On a final note, I ask our regular community members to be welcoming and
  tolerant of  people who they think have different ideas from their own.
  There is no doubt that I have learned the most when I was in dialogue
 with
  people who had vastly different  opinions from mine.  I think that this
 will
  be true in our community, too.

 I didn't say that we shouldn't look into readers' opinions; I said
 that *decision* is on editors, as it is not the question of life and
 death; not even a high profile question out of right-wing US. (Many
 Muslim countries already filter sexually explicit images; which means
 that it is not their question, as well.)


Seeking outside opinions, and outreach efforts to bring more people into our
Communities are high on my list of priorities because WMF contributor base
is too homogeneous for me to be comfortable that our community members are
making neutral decisions.


 Contrary to your premises, I don't think that raising number of
 readers and editors lays in filtering any image. All of the numbers
 show that it is about other things, like, for example, that Facebook
 is more attractive than editing Wikipedia. If you have some data to
 support your position, please let us know.


1) We have people speaking up publicly saying that they are not able to edit
from some locations because of the presence of some images on our Projects.
Numerous editors have told me this in private, too. 2) We regularly have
people put up controversial content  for deletion because they find it
offensive or out of scope. 3) Image filters are commonly available on other
internet website, often by default.

The idea of offering imagine filters on WMF project is much more
controversial than it is on other internet websites. So, I I think that it
is fair to suggest that we examine why we are having conflicts over this
topic when other website don't. One possible reason is that our base of
editors is different from other websites. If that is true, then I think we
need to allow for this difference when we make features to appeal to
readers.


 The last issue is the fact that modern encyclopedia is well
 *ideologically* defined. It is positivist phenomenon and its roots are
 in scientific method. Wikipedia has Five pillars and a number of other
 policies which define it ideologically, as well. Those who think that
 such project is unacceptable are free to use other sums of knowledge
 and to build their own ones. It is not possible to be absolutely
 inclusive. Being fully acceptable for ~50% of population is also very
 questionable.


On WMF projects images are not collected using anything remotely close to
the Five pillars that define content on Wikipedia projects. Much of the
content is self made, low quality, and without out descriptions that would
be adequate to give proper captions for publication in the general media,
and certainly not in a scholarly works.

The way that WMF collects and uses images is one of the biggest differences
between us and other organizations that have a similar mission. Libraries,
museums, universities, publishers of reference works, and other
educationally minded organizations do not solicit for amateur images for
their collections.  Lack of peer review of our images prior to acquisition
is at the heart of the problem and is large part of what is causing the
disconnect between the people who do not approve of our controversial
content and our editors who upload the images.

Sydney
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread Yann Forget

2011/9/7 Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com:

 The way that WMF collects and uses images is one of the biggest differences
 between us and other organizations that have a similar mission. Libraries,
 museums, universities, publishers of reference works, and other
 educationally minded organizations do not solicit for amateur images for
 their collections.  Lack of peer review of our images prior to acquisition
 is at the heart of the problem and is large part of what is causing the
 disconnect between the people who do not approve of our controversial
 content and our editors who upload the images.

Well, other educationally minded organizations do not either solicit
amateurs for writing encyclopedic articles.
But we do peer review images after they have been uploaded on Commons
or Wikipedia.

It seems that, 10 years after Wikipedia and its sisters have been
created, you still do not understand that there are wikis.

 Sydney

Regards,

Yann

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Thomas Morton  Agreed - this is not a good

 WP is unsuited to news.

See item #3 in this Signpost re. death of Osama bin Laden. We nailed it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-05-09/News_and_notes

Wikipedia seems to get a lot of hits when it keeps up with the news. I
think it reflects well on the project and has a bit of a wow!
factor. It also gets us press coverage. So I'm all for news in
Wikipedia.

en.User:Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 7:35 AM, Yann Forget yan...@gmail.com wrote:

 2011/9/7 Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com:
 
  The way that WMF collects and uses images is one of the biggest
 differences
  between us and other organizations that have a similar mission.
 Libraries,
  museums, universities, publishers of reference works, and other
  educationally minded organizations do not solicit for amateur images for
  their collections.  Lack of peer review of our images prior to
 acquisition
  is at the heart of the problem and is large part of what is causing the
  disconnect between the people who do not approve of our controversial
  content and our editors who upload the images.

 Well, other educationally minded organizations do not either solicit
 amateurs for writing encyclopedic articles.
 But we do peer review images after they have been uploaded on Commons
 or Wikipedia.

 It seems that, 10 years after Wikipedia and its sisters have been
 created, you still do not understand that there are wikis.

  Sydney

 Regards,

 Yann


Hi Yann,

You are someone that does deletions on Commons of images that are out of
scope. I very much appreciate your work as it helps keep some of the worst
images out of Commons.

But in my view, this is not the same type of peer review that is used when
creating content on Wikipedia. In general, we expect the content to come
from an existing body of work that has already under gone a vigorous form of
review by people who are trained to know if the content is high quality or
not.

I upload original images to Commons, too. :-)

I'm not suggesting that we abandon this system now. But we need to recognize
the way that the abundance of low quality images is limiting our ability to
create high quality works.

In practice, some Wikipedias also have a problem with peer reviewing
content, too. Suppression of unsourced content is needed because some wikis
don't have a way to prevent the addition of very inappropriate material.

IMO, reminding ourselves of the problems with the way that wikis work is
essential to finding ways to improve.

Sydney
User:FloNight
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Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

2011-09-07 Thread Theo10011

With all due respect, this sounds almost delusional. The fact is, it is the
restrictive control being exercised at Wikinews to fulfill some internal
quality standards that is choking the idea behind the project.

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:03 PM, pi zero wn.pi.z...@gmail.com wrote:

 Having only a few hours ago been alerted to the existence of this thread,
 I'm afraid I'm rather overwhelmed by it.  Way too long to read.  I've
 glimpsed a number of false/misleading statements about en.wn in passing,
 but
 would probably spent all night properly locating them all, let alone
 attempting to answer them.  (Hm, there was something about Wikinews being a
 bureaucracy, and of course the post that started this thread...)  I'm also
 rather puzzled by the nature of this thread, which seems to be largely
 non-Wikinewsies discussing what they think about how the inner workings
 ought to be changed of a sister project whose *current* inner workings are
 probably more unfamiliar to ---for a non-random example--- Wikipedians than
 those of any other sister.  (I've spent three years studying it and am
 hopefully just about up to speed now.)

 However, in a general collegial spirit toward Wikimedians having a
 discussion (whyever they're doing that), I'll offer a few general remarks
 about en.wn.

 en.wn is a wiki at, roughly, the extreme opposite end of several spectra
 from en.wp.  To oversimplify (the only way I'll get anywhere in this),
 en.wn
 is just about as different a wiki from en.wp as it is possible for a wiki
 to
 be.  Note, there is nothing un-wiki about en.wn.  It's very wiki.  What it
 *isn't* is Wikipedian.  Some Wikipedians, I think, are actually kind of
 afraid of en.wn, because all wmf wikis are drive by idealism, and part of
 the idealism of Wikipedia is a belief in various rules of wiki dynamics
 that
 aren't the way en.wn works.  Volunteers driven by idealism naturally have a
 massive emotional investment in those ideals ---that's what makes idealism
 great for sister projects!--- and in this case it means these Wikipedians
 have a massive emotional investment in disbelieving in the way en.wn works.


If that spectra is based on the level of activity and openness than I might
agree, it is on the opposite end of en.wp. So according to you, we
wikipedians are afraid of en.wn, that's a rather scientific argument. You
lose me after that, something about idealism and emotional investment.



 The thing is, Wikinews confronts boldly, every day for several years now,
 challenges of quality control that Wikipedia is glacially slowly being
 forced to sidle up to if it is to thrive on into the future.  These are
 *really difficult challenges*, and I'm kind of amazed by how well we're
 dealing with this stuff that Wikipedia isn't ready for yet.  Obviously
 Wikipedia will never be Wikinews, but... Wikinews is the vanguard, and
 Wikipedia will eventually benefit from things we're figuring out (very,
 very
 slowly, but that's hardly surprising).


Yes, its a big problem the glacially slow quality control on English
Wikipedia. The facts however tend to disagree with you supposition. It's
larger and more well written than ever before. But it is good you can
congratulate yourself already, Wikinews being the Vanguard and all. It's
good that you think Wikipedia can survive in the shadow of Wikinews and find
benefits from it.



 A note on a slightly different tack.  A comment I made in a private
 discussion a few days ago (among experienced Wikinewsies, about the inner
 workings of the project) ran something like this:
  I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
 university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as
 homework.
 Besides the somewhat incidental fact I'm proud of the project, there are
 two
 points of interest here.


Yes, lets congratulate Wikinews again.



 First, we do have a class of, I think, about thirty university journalism
 students currently submitting articles for review.  Yes, that can produce a
 glut on the review queue, which we're learning how to keep up with and not
 allow it to keep us from reviewing the best articles in reasonable time.
  Of
 course we *also* want to spend a significant amount of time reviewing the
 *worse* articles, because how can those authors improve without feedback?
 Tricky.  This also means an especially high number of failing article
 reviews.  Some of these students honestly don't get at first the concept of
 neutrality, or perhaps how to not plagiarize, or some other basic
 principle.  Last semester we were surprised by how many final-year
 journalism students had trouble with this stuff, and we didn't let up our
 standards for them, and from what we hear, the professor was *delighted*.
 That's apparently just what he wanted, and he's sent another class this
 semester to get some hard knocks from us.


Is this your metric of success? Some university decided to send 30 students
to work online on a news based open project?

Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews


 See item #3 in this Signpost re. death of Osama bin Laden. We nailed it:


 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-05-09/News_and_notes

 Wikipedia seems to get a lot of hits when it keeps up with the news. I
 think it reflects well on the project and has a bit of a wow!
 factor. It also gets us press coverage. So I'm all for news in
 Wikipedia.


It's not *news* though - it's supposed to be a historical record. There is a
lot more content that a news article could/should cover (with a different
tense  style for starters).

We consolidate news into historical record; and people find that useful.

But more often than not we get it wrong, or end up doing reporting rather
than recording. The reason WikiNews exists is because WP is intended as a
record! :)

Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

2011-09-07 Thread Nikola Smolenski

On 07/09/11 09:33, pi zero wrote:
 I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
 university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as homework.

This is being done on Wikipedia regularly without any extra bureaucratic 
overhead.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

2011-09-07 Thread Milos Rancic

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 10:22, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 7 September 2011 09:15, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:

 We need to stop wasting time and energy on personal wishes of two
 Board members. As it isn't about removing the content, any solution is
 better than wasting willingness on one nonconstructive and decadent
 project. If that time and energy was spent on rewriting Parser, we
 would have WYSIWYG editor a year or two ago.

 Although I broadly agree with the rest of your message, I disagree
 with the Parser bit on the end - basically, the parser rewrite had to
 pass muster with someone at Brion or Tim level, as there's not really
 anyone else who would be able to say these bits of syntax are out
 and have it stick; and since I suspect Tim would rather spork his eyes
 out than read the words parser rewrite ever again, getting Brion in
 to work on it was the only way to make it go forward. Developer effort
 is not fungible in the face of politics :-)

I had in my mind organizational efforts, mostly. However, I saw that
at least one tech employee is against the filter, as well as Tim is in
favor. So, they already waste their time. (Said so, I think that
important value of WMF is exactly the fact that their employees are
able to freely express their positions.)

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:22 PM, Thomas Morton

 Wikipedia seems to get a lot of hits when it keeps up with the news. I
 think it reflects well on the project and has a bit of a wow!
 factor. It also gets us press coverage. So I'm all for news in
 Wikipedia.


 It's not *news* though - it's supposed to be a historical record. There is a
 lot more content that a news article could/should cover (with a different
 tense  style for starters).

 We consolidate news into historical record; and people find that useful.

The old canard, but quite a lovely one I feel, is that journalism is
the first draft of history. Wikipedia is sometimes that.

Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says Wikipedia does not
record events until they are x days/months old?

I'm sure there are hundreds of examples of edits made about current
events that are regrettable and I'm sure BLPs are often plastered with
something that happened yesterday out of all proportion to that
person's life taken in toto. But I think we're capable of dealing with
that.

If the lifecycle of an article that involves current news is:

Stable article - [news event happens] - article chaos - heavily
edited/recentist - calms down but still recentist - stable and due
weight accorded to event.

I think that's fine. In fact I think the chaos is what gets people
fired up and drives them to make something really good.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews


 Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says Wikipedia does not
 record events until they are x days/months old?


Yes, this would solve a large number of problems (not least resolving the
historical significance issue).

If the lifecycle of an article that involves current news is:

 Stable article - [news event happens] - article chaos - heavily
 edited/recentist - calms down but still recentist - stable and due
 weight accorded to event.


Many articles are still in a shoddy state of repair - current events keep on
happening, and people willing to spend the time ensuring articles stick to
policy and avoid the worst SPA problems are constantly moving on to the next
one. Past events languish.

Even then; during this period they are not good news, they are a quickly
changing record - often inaccurate and usually poorly written. WN is better
set up to cope with this process.

Some of our very worst content is about recent events.
Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Nikola Smolenski smole...@eunet.rs wrote:

 I'm proud of Wikinews.  We're so damn good at teaching how to write, a
 university journalism professor is assigning us to his students as homework.

 This is being done on Wikipedia regularly without any extra bureaucratic
 overhead.

I don't know enough about Wikinews to start drawing comparisons
between Wikipedia and Wikinews as projects.

But if comparisons are going to be drawn, can they be in the spirit of
here's lessons that can be learned, one from the other rather than
saying we're better than you?

So, for example, with the above comment, perhaps it would be helpful
to say how Wikipedia has achieved student/teacher participation
without bureaucracy.

As I understand it the WMF and Wikipedia volunteers have spent time
and resources in grooming teachers and institutions that are amenable
to introducing Wikipedia as part of assignments. Wikinews has less
(fewer?) resources for that sort of outreach. Also Wikipedia has a far
broader potential reach to classrooms since it covers all topics,
whereas Wikinews will appeal specifically to journalism classes
(perhaps others, but the point will still stand).

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Thomas Morton

 Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says Wikipedia does not
 record events until they are x days/months old?

 Yes, this would solve a large number of problems (not least resolving the
 historical significance issue).

I think we'd lose something valuable. As I say, we often get positive
news coverage for our articles on recent events. Osama was one, the
death of Michael Jackson was one, I think we got good reviews for the
New Orleans hurricane too.

 Even then; during this period they are not good news, they are a quickly
 changing record - often inaccurate and usually poorly written. WN is better
 set up to cope with this process.

Well, I haven't done any type of survey of our articles that fall into
the area we're discussing, so I'll defer to you on your points.

It wouldn't surprise me if it were the case that the articles are
poor, that seems quite likely to me.

Nevertheless I think it's like Samuel Johnson's comment, to misquote:

Sir, an encyclopedia reporting on news events is like a dog’s walking
on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find
it done at all.

I find news events covered in Wikipedia exciting. And it marks us out
from the competition.

Just out of interest, and I assure you I don't ask this as a way of
trying to trip you up - I genuinely ask out of curiosity: let's say a
celebrity dies of old age (and that there's not a great deal of
interesting things to say about the death), would you apply the no
news for x days/months rule to an edit to their dates? I'm presuming
not.

The question raises a thought for me, though. I think if we decide
that we are not going to capture things because they are not far
enough in the past, we may not capture them at all. People are
invigorated by things that have just happened. If we say no, you must
wait three months I'm sure that person isn't going to place a red
cross on their calendar and come back to record it. It will simply not
get written, I would suggest.

Perhaps it will take a decade before the ultimate article on the Iraq
War is written. But I'm glad we have *something* there now.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Milos Rancic mill...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:35, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote:
  Seeking outside opinions, and outreach efforts to bring more people into
 our
  Communities are high on my list of priorities because WMF contributor
 base
  is too homogeneous for me to be comfortable that our community members
 are
  making neutral decisions.


 That doesn't give a picture of how deep that problem is. Without
 harder evidences, I could freely conclude that it's just about
 particular portion of US society which is anyway positioned far from
 our ideals, so not worthy of efforts. (Similarly to that, I have no
 intention to work ma making Wikipedia closer to Serbian morons of any
 kind. The necessary prerequisite for using internet and Wikipedia is
 not to be a moron.)


We know that our core contributors are a homogeneous group and could be
introducing biases into WMF, both in  content and policy decisions.

We can start from the premise that WMF is an international organizations
that needs to find ways for people of all cultures to work to together.

We can recognize going into every situation that our contributions are going
to be seen by people who do not share the biases we have.

We can attempt to avoid making stereotypical  comments about people from
other cultures.

If we don't do these things then it is near impossible to be an organization
where people of all cultures feel free to express their opinion, and join
the community. Without the opinions of these people, then we will not
achieve our core mission.

Sydney

User:FloNight





  The idea of offering imagine filters on WMF project is much more
  controversial than it is on other internet websites. So, I I think that
 it
  is fair to suggest that we examine why we are having conflicts over this
  topic when other website don't. One possible reason is that our base of
  editors is different from other websites. If that is true, then I think
 we
  need to allow for this difference when we make features to appeal to
  readers.

 I don't see that as a problem and something unusual. We are community
 driven and we don't depend on Rupert Murdoch et al., unlike any other
 commercial sites.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread David Levy

Sydney Poore wrote:

The idea of offering imagine filters on WMF project is much more
controversial than it is on other internet websites. So, I I think
that it is fair to suggest that we examine why we are having
conflicts over this topic when other website don't. One possible
reason is that our base of editors is different from other websites.

Websites like Flickr (an example commonly cited) are commercial
endeavors whose decisions are based on profitability, not an
obligation to maintain neutrality (a core element of most WMF
projects). These services can cater to the revenue-driving majorities
(with geographic segregation, if need be) and ignore minorities whose
beliefs fall outside the mainstream for a given country. We mustn't
do that.

One of the main issues regarding the proposed system is the need to
determine which image types to label potentially objectionable and
place under the limited number of optional filters. Due to cultural
bias, some people (including a segment of voters in the referendum,
some of whom commented on its various talk pages) believe that this is
as simple as creating a few categories along the lines of nudity,
sex, violence and gore (defined and populated in accordance with
arbitrary standards).

For a website like Flickr, that probably works fairly well; a majority
of users will be satisfied, with the rest too fragmented to be
accommodated in a cost-effective manner. Revenues are maximized.
Mission accomplished.

The WMF projects' missions are dramatically different. For most,
neutrality is a nonnegotiable principle. To provide an optional
filter for image type x and not image type y is to formally
validate the former objection and not the latter. That's
unacceptable.

An alternative implementation, endorsed by WMF trustee Samuel Klein,
is discussed here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Image_filter_referendum/en/Categories#general_image_filter_vs._category_system
or
http://goo.gl/t6ly5

David Levy

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced


  The idea of offering imagine filters on WMF project is much more
  controversial than it is on other internet websites. So, I I think
  that it is fair to suggest that we examine why we are having
  conflicts over this topic when other website don't. One possible
  reason is that our base of editors is different from other websites.

 Websites like Flickr (an example commonly cited) are commercial
 endeavors whose decisions are based on profitability, not an
 obligation to maintain neutrality (a core element of most WMF
 projects).  These services can cater to the revenue-driving majorities
 (with geographic segregation, if need be) and ignore minorities whose
 beliefs fall outside the mainstream for a given country.  We mustn't
 do that.


Brilliantly put!


 One of the main issues regarding the proposed system is the need to
 determine which image types to label potentially objectionable and
 place under the limited number of optional filters.  Due to cultural
 bias, some people (including a segment of voters in the referendum,
 some of whom commented on its various talk pages) believe that this is
 as simple as creating a few categories along the lines of nudity,
 sex, violence and gore (defined and populated in accordance with
 arbitrary standards).


I think a key part of resolving this is to avoid calling the labels
potentially objectionable. I mean - anything can be potentially
objectionable, it depends on the individual.

Obviously we cast this in the nudity/Mohammed light, because those are the
most high profile examples.

But another example; clowns.

Some people are terrified of clowns, even their images. You wouldn't
describe images of clowns as potentially objectionable but it would be
great for Coulrophobes to go oh hey Wikipedia, I don't like clowns so can
you hide pics of them for me please? Thanks.

Some people are squeamish - so OK let the hides images involving blood/gore.
Foot phobia? (that's common enough) Hide images of naked feet.

And so on.

This should not be about filtering potentially objectionable images, but
about giving readers a way to filter their experience in a way that makes
them feel safe and happy. And that is the light to cast  develop the
feature

Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikinews-l] The systematic and codified bias against non-Western articles on Wikinews

2011-09-07 Thread Neil Babbage

The projects will always have some crossover (or grey areas if you 
prefer) because they present the same information, just in different 
ways. For example, a textbook (Wikibooks) presents the same information 
as an encyclopedia but in a more inclusive way. That is, it tries to 
present all the information on a subject, not link out to other books in 
the WP style. It is also worded in a more conversational style. The 
Wikinews / Wikipedia crossover is obvious. A news event is reported by 
Wikinews, usually as a synergy of other news sources and it evolved as 
difering source speculation turns to consensual fact. Eventually the 
story becomes static and if it remains noteworthy it should then form 
the solid basis for a Wikipedia article.

This of course relates only to events not places or people. By that I 
mean if Osama is killed then of course the article about Osama is 
updated with the news of his death. But the news report itself is better 
started in Wikinews until it stabilises and only then becomes an 
article in itself in WP assuming it has the relevant significance.

In an ideal world all news events would start on Wikinews this way, but 
that'll never happen so it's more a question of encouraging that kind of 
behaviour while accepting the world isn't perfect, isn't it?


On 07/09/2011 14:05, Bod Notbod wrote:
 On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Thomas Morton

 Does anyone want to argue for a policy that says Wikipedia does not
 record events until they are x days/months old?
 Yes, this would solve a large number of problems (not least resolving the
 historical significance issue).
 I think we'd lose something valuable. As I say, we often get positive
 news coverage for our articles on recent events. Osama was one, the
 death of Michael Jackson was one, I think we got good reviews for the
 New Orleans hurricane too.

 Even then; during this period they are not good news, they are a quickly
 changing record - often inaccurate and usually poorly written. WN is better
 set up to cope with this process.
 Well, I haven't done any type of survey of our articles that fall into
 the area we're discussing, so I'll defer to you on your points.

 It wouldn't surprise me if it were the case that the articles are
 poor, that seems quite likely to me.

 Nevertheless I think it's like Samuel Johnson's comment, to misquote:

 Sir, an encyclopedia reporting on news events is like a dog’s walking
 on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find
 it done at all.

 I find news events covered in Wikipedia exciting. And it marks us out
 from the competition.

 Just out of interest, and I assure you I don't ask this as a way of
 trying to trip you up - I genuinely ask out of curiosity: let's say a
 celebrity dies of old age (and that there's not a great deal of
 interesting things to say about the death), would you apply the no
 news for x days/months rule to an edit to their dates? I'm presuming
 not.

 The question raises a thought for me, though. I think if we decide
 that we are not going to capture things because they are not far
 enough in the past, we may not capture them at all. People are
 invigorated by things that have just happened. If we say no, you must
 wait three months I'm sure that person isn't going to place a red
 cross on their calendar and come back to record it. It will simply not
 get written, I would suggest.

 Perhaps it will take a decade before the ultimate article on the Iraq
 War is written. But I'm glad we have *something* there now.

 Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:29 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote:

Sydney Poore wrote:

Today to be successful organizations; both for-profit and not-for-profit,
must recognize the needs of their global audience. Offering image filters
where people can set their own preferences and bypass the setting for
individual settings is brilliant way for people with different values to
share the same space. No content is removed, and people can see all images
if they choose to.

This approach is far better than the approach used by most other large
educational institutions which currently control the viewing of
controversial content through their acquisition process.

An alternative implementation, endorsed by WMF trustee Samuel Klein,
is discussed here:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Image_filter_referendum/en/Categories#general_image_filter_vs._category_system
or
http://goo.gl/t6ly5

Organizations who share our mission make these type of decisions everyday.
They consider the ideals that frame their mission, and then craft work
policies and procedures that balance all of their ideals. IMO, that is
exactly what the WMF Board and staff have been doing in regard to
controversial content for the last 18 months. Because WMF has a strong,
strong tradition of community involvement at every level practical, the
community is being asked to help craft the policy and procedures.

Various ideas about how to label images for a personal filter have been
floated around for years. The referendum asked the community for opinions
about features that could be included.

I see this as goodness. Evidently, other people disagree given the large
volume of posts and remarks criticizing the referendum.

Some of the criticism is fair, and I'm sure that people involved with
planning the referendum will take it on board. Being experienced
Wikimedians, I imagine that they will put all the comments in proper
context, even words spoken in the heat of moment. But still, we need to
remember that the people working on this issue as part of their fiduciary
responsibility or employment are doing with the best intentions of WMF in
mind. And they need to be thanked for their work.

Thank you to everyone who has commented in the thread. Through dialogue with
each other on this transparent mailing list, we are showing the world that
it possible to collaboratively collect and disseminate free knowledge.

Sydney Poore

User:FloNight
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced


 Agreed.  And one of the most important aspects to acknowledge is the
 infeasibility of labeling/grouping images based on what we believe
 people will want to filter.


I confess to not being on top of the exact mechanics of this proposal...
but why can we not be using normal categories?

Ok so for ease of use it is sensible to consider pre-made bundles of
commonly filtered images (and I can see the issues there, obviously).

But for the default use filtering on categories is fine... then we can us
the normal Wiki system and stick to neutrality (Don't like English Churches?
Fine, add it to your exclusion list :))

Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On 7 September 2011 15:40, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:

 I confess to not being on top of the exact mechanics of this proposal...
 but why can we not be using normal categories?
 Ok so for ease of use it is sensible to consider pre-made bundles of
 commonly filtered images (and I can see the issues there, obviously).
 But for the default use filtering on categories is fine... then we can us
 the normal Wiki system and stick to neutrality (Don't like English Churches?
 Fine, add it to your exclusion list :))


* The category system is constructed of minute subcategories, not
broad categories that are then combined.

You could then say this and everything under it. But then you run into:

* The category system is not very consistent.
* The category system is not free of loops.
* An image on en:wp could be a local image (one system of categories)
or a Commons image (a completely different system of categories).

Thus, to use categories for an image filtering system would indeed
require constructing a category for the specific purpose of exclusion.
Big ALA actually, that *is* censorship alarm goes off.

The closest we could come to a neutral filtering system is an easily
accessible on/off switch for images.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread Risker

On 7 September 2011 10:48, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 snip




 The closest we could come to a neutral filtering system is an easily
 accessible on/off switch for images.


Interestingly, this proposal has come up many times completely separate to
the issue of image filtering.  Many users, particularly those on dial-up
systems or those whose billing is related to the amount of data accessed
have asked for this ability for some time. For them it is a performance/cost
issue, and has nothing to do with filtering. Given some of the arguments
that have been made in opposition to filtering, particularly those that seem
to focus on the content should be displayed in the way the authors
intended, I'm concerned there would be equally significant opposition to
even this simple matter.

Risker/Anne
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced


 Thus, to use categories for an image filtering system would indeed
 require constructing a category for the specific purpose of exclusion.
 Big ALA actually, that *is* censorship alarm goes off.


This is true, and I agree. but...


 * The category system is constructed of minute subcategories, not
 broad categories that are then combined.

 You could then say this and everything under it. But then you run into:

 * The category system is not very consistent.
 * The category system is not free of loops.
 * An image on en:wp could be a local image (one system of categories)
 or a Commons image (a completely different system of categories).


This is largely an engineering problem; and it can probably be overcome with
some architecture work. As we are going to be implementing a major new
feature *anyway* it's not something to reject outright, I think :)

Obviously given the complexity of the category tree system any such
engineering wouldn't be infallible - but you could match it to most use
cases. Ultimately it is just a collapsing tree problem, and they are ten a
penny to a decent engineer :)

Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On 7 September 2011 15:55, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:

 Obviously given the complexity of the category tree system any such
 engineering wouldn't be infallible - but you could match it to most use
 cases. Ultimately it is just a collapsing tree problem, and they are ten a
 penny to a decent engineer :)


The category trees are pathological in every way. Unless you try to
regularise the category system for the purpose of making the filter
easier to implement, which I predict will lead to *considerable*
community resistance and obstruction.


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On 7 September 2011 15:58, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 On 7 September 2011 15:55, Thomas Morton morton.tho...@googlemail.com
 wrote:

  Obviously given the complexity of the category tree system any such
  engineering wouldn't be infallible - but you could match it to most use
  cases. Ultimately it is just a collapsing tree problem, and they are ten
 a
  penny to a decent engineer :)


 The category trees are pathological in every way. Unless you try to
 regularise the category system for the purpose of making the filter
 easier to implement, which I predict will lead to *considerable*
 community resistance and obstruction.


As I said; you can't cover every situation. But you can engineer around the
basic hierarchy - and leave the rest to a button saying add this image to
my filter.

I don't see that as a major roadblock.

Tom


 - d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 2:46 PM, Thomas Morton
morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:

 But another example; clowns.

 Some people are terrified of clowns, even their images. You wouldn't
 describe images of clowns as potentially objectionable but it would be
 great for Coulrophobes to go oh hey Wikipedia, I don't like clowns so can
 you hide pics of them for me please? Thanks.

I have a phobia. I would like to overcome it. All my reading suggests
that what I need to do is expose myself to the thing I fear, more and
more, in incremental steps.

So, if Wikipedia is to be a good citizen in the online world what we
should actually do for someone afeared of clowns is to make sure that
they see a picture of a clown once every, say, ten articles or so *no
matter what the article is about*. This should be ratcheted up
gradually so that at some point all the user sees is a big picture of
Ronald Macdonald whenever they visit Wikipedia.

Once the user reports that they are cured we can return their service
back to normal and they can then educate themselves, do their homework
whatever, without trepidation.

Bodnotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread Milos Rancic

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 15:14, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote:
 We know that our core contributors are a homogeneous group and could be
 introducing biases into WMF, both in  content and policy decisions.

Of course. Those editors created Wikipedia based on their biases.
There wouldn't be Wikipedia without people whose ideology is to build
free knowledge repository. There are others, biased in other ways, and
they created, for example, Conservapedia.

 We can start from the premise that WMF is an international organizations
 that needs to find ways for people of all cultures to work to together.

That's demagogy. Whenever anyone from the *international* community
spoke about need for multicultural perspective, very precise issues
were raised. Dominant influx in this issue is not from international
community, but from one part of American society, supported tactically
by people who have similar positions in relation to

Besides that, the most vocal international people are usually
talking about imposing their POV, which is in collision with NPOV
policy.

I agree that there many issues exist and we should start gather those
issues. However, again, we are not talking here about protecting
indigenous people of Australia from publishing photos of their sacred
places, but about very common place in US. Thus, there is nothing here
with multiculturalism.

 We can recognize going into every situation that our contributions are going
 to be seen by people who do not share the biases we have.

May you list those biases, because you are talking too generally. What
are the biases of Wikipedians for yourself?

 We can attempt to avoid making stereotypical  comments about people from
 other cultures.

May you define what the phrase other cultures means to you? I can't
say that American culture is not mine, as well. From time to time I am
better introduced into the current events in US than in Serbia.

 If we don't do these things then it is near impossible to be an organization
 where people of all cultures feel free to express their opinion, and join
 the community. Without the opinions of these people, then we will not
 achieve our core mission.

If by culture you mean all parts of particular societies, then
Wikipedia is not for all of them; as neither Encyclopédie was for
everyone from Paris. Particular intellectual level is needed to be
able to accept the world as-is.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Thomas Morton
morton.tho...@googlemail.com wrote:

 As I said; you can't cover every situation. But you can engineer around the
 basic hierarchy - and leave the rest to a button saying add this image to
 my filter.

I'm in favour of the filter (my argument being I'm not super-excited
about having it, but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
children they can't use Wikipedia) but I do worry about the
implementation.

I'm not looking forward to the possibility that every picture is going
to be surrounded by filter-cruft. I don't really want pictures of
planets, plants, fonts, colours and anything else that's universally
inoffensive being accompanied with buttons. I hope there's a more
elegant solution but if we're giving the user control of their filter
then I wonder how this can be avoided.

Boednotbod

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced


 I'm not looking forward to the possibility that every picture is going
 to be surrounded by filter-cruft. I don't really want pictures of
 planets, plants, fonts, colours and anything else that's universally
 inoffensive being accompanied with buttons. I hope there's a more
 elegant solution but if we're giving the user control of their filter
 then I wonder how this can be avoided.


True; that is a UI engineering problem - and we have significant UI problems
already so it needs to be considered carefully (so as not to compound
current issues).

The easiest/neatest solution (that I have in my mind) is probably a little
tiny dot/arrow/icon appear at the top right of every image when you pass
over it, that then brings up a drown down menu when you hover.

Tom
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread David Levy

Sydney Poore wrote:

 Today to be successful organizations; both for-profit and
 not-for-profit, must recognize the needs of their global audience.
 Offering image filters where people can set their own preferences
 and bypass the setting for individual settings is brilliant way
 for people with different values to share the same space. No content
 is removed, and people can see all images if they choose to.

Agreed.  That's why I support the image filter implementation proposed here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Image_filter_referendum/en/Categories#general_image_filter_vs._category_system
or
http://goo.gl/t6ly5

Because we seek to accommodate a global audience (comprising people
whose beliefs are extremely diverse), I unreservedly oppose any
implementation necessitating the designation of certain image types
(and not others) as potentially objectionable or similar.

David Levy

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Re: [Foundation-l] EU Consultation on Open Access (deadline coming soon)

On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 11:50:13PM -0500, Keegan Peterzell wrote:
 On Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 6:40 PM, Kim Bruning k...@bruning.xs4all.nl wrote:
 
  You can fill it in as a citizen, (which I did)
 
 
 Who, me?

Haha, yes, you too, provided you're in an EU country. :-)

Sincerely,
Kim Bruning

-- 
I question the question of questioning all questions.

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Re: [Foundation-l] On curiosity, cats and scapegoats

On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 05:30:54PM +0200, Kim Bruning wrote:
 On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 05:51:40PM +0200, Lodewijk wrote:
  The question shouldn't [...] be about whether we want to
  offer [...] people [...] Wikipedia? 

(
just as a note: This quote is intended as an illustration of why
it may be preferable to have an all-or-nothing policy for
wikipedia articles, as opposed to we-hide-parts-of-the-article.

If part of a story is hidden, you can introduce very
strong bias.

Obviously, it is not normally my intention to deliberately
twist people's words. (Other than as an illustration here)
)

sincerely,
Kim Bruning 


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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 06:35:02AM -0400, Sydney Poore wrote:
 1) We have people speaking up publicly saying that they are not able to edit
 from some locations because of the presence of some images on our Projects.
 Numerous editors have told me this in private, too. 

Seriously? So at least one of my theoretical scenarios and potential exploits
have already been spotted in the wild (albeit inadvertant, and in embryonic 
form).
AKA, it's not theoretical.

Oh wow, blue team is SO dead.  O:-)

By the way, if people are already reaping the bad karma for fubaring their own
networks, why are we trying to help them?

sincerely,
Kim Bruning
Who wants to run a censorship wiki-wargame. (As soon as I have some 
time off
again ;-)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 09:14:14AM -0400, Sydney Poore wrote:
 
 We know that our core contributors are a homogeneous group and could be
 introducing biases into WMF, both in  content and policy decisions.

The bias is towards the concept of openness and an acceptance of
otherness.

There are 2 approaches here:
* We can run this bias to self destruction (due to its tendency to
  water itself down to nothing over time)
* We can strongly keep re-invigorating this bias, so that it
  remains operational. This requires a little oomph from time to
  time. As the saying goes: the price of openness and freedom is 
  eternal vigilance, and all that.

My personal preference is to hold to the vigilant approach, and
continuously work to provide an anti-bias bias.

 We can start from the premise that WMF is an international organizations
 that needs to find ways for people of all cultures to work to together.

Um, Hi, Person from 2 or 3 of those cultures here (depending on
how you count) O:-)

I've had hilarious situations where people accused me of having a
united states bias[1], and modifying stuff I'd written to be more
international... at which point they rewrote it from a united states
bias. ;-)

As soon as you go down to common fundamentals you -more often
than not- don't actually go down to fundamentals, but rather you
end up reaffirming your own personal fundamentals (and thus
biases) instead. It's a psychology thing, possibly with a topping
of epistemology.

The only solution that I've ever known to work at all is to
stay frosty, stay on your toes, and find (partial) consensus with
your peers (those who are already present), and work to find more
new peers from outside that circle. 

It is absolutely impossible to predict the way of thinking of
people whom you have no interaction with. Don't try to get in
their head, don't try to speak FOR them. Instead, work out how to
engage with them, then do so.

So don't make an Ass Of U and ME (ASSUME). Do Actually Start
Kommunicating (ASK)!

Incidentally, from a interacting with people outside your peer
group perspective. most forms of (innocious!) filtering are
*disasterous* [2]. 

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

[1] This was patently impossible, as I had never
set foot in the americas at that point in time.
[2] http://www.thefilterbubble.com/ted-talk

ps I'm blessed with many different sets of biases:
* Commonwealth/Kiwi point of view. 
* Orange/Cloggy point of view. 
* Expat point of view. (Expats tend to have more in common with  
  each other than with host nation or nation of origin.)
(See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kim_Bruning for
illustration)



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Re: [Foundation-l] Tragedy: videos and slides from presentations Wikimanias (lately 2011 in Haifa)

On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 05:44:58AM +0200, Mike Dupont wrote:
 Hi,
 we have been using archive.org for our conference videos, it works pretty
 good.
 mike

\o/

Yes, and the we in this case are AWESOME people. :-D

(if only because they make the trains run on time... I mean... get
the videos online!)

sincerely,
Kim (Yay FLOSSK!) Bruning 

-- 


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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Tue, Sep 06, 2011 at 05:21:22PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:

 Theoretically they could be an editor (and we should of course work
 on the principle that they could manage that at any time) but in
 practice most aren't and we need to cater for them where possible.

It is very hard to cater for someone when you are not engaged with
them in conversation. Any attempts to do so are doomed to make an ASS
of U and ME (ASSUME).

Don't ASSUME. ASK! 

We have an existing mechanism by which people can engage and ASK, but
many choose not to use it. Per definition, they are forfeiting their
rights, unfortunately, (if they even exist).  

How can I lose sleep over those people, if I don't even know if they 
have anything to say in the first place? 

Incidentally, many attempts to help readers end up actually
disenfranchising them. (and also disenfranchise anyone who might have
been in a position to help them). Why? Because it puts a wedge
between producers and consumers, even while we're attempting to
create a prosumer class.

I do lose a bit of sleep over that.

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 12:55 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 7 September 2011 10:48, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 snip




 The closest we could come to a neutral filtering system is an easily
 accessible on/off switch for images.


 Interestingly, this proposal has come up many times completely separate to
 the issue of image filtering.  Many users, particularly those on dial-up
 systems or those whose billing is related to the amount of data accessed
 have asked for this ability for some time. For them it is a performance/cost
 issue, and has nothing to do with filtering. Given some of the arguments
 that have been made in opposition to filtering, particularly those that seem
 to focus on the content should be displayed in the way the authors
 intended, I'm concerned there would be equally significant opposition to
 even this simple matter.

Turning off images should be, and can be, done by the user-agent.
We have a help page describing how to do this.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 12:38 AM, Sydney Poore sydney.po...@gmail.com wrote:
 On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:29 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote:

 Sydney Poore wrote:

  The idea of offering imagine filters on WMF project is much more
  controversial than it is on other internet websites. So, I I think
  that it is fair to suggest that we examine why we are having
  conflicts over this topic when other website don't. One possible
  reason is that our base of editors is different from other websites.

 Websites like Flickr (an example commonly cited) are commercial
 endeavors whose decisions are based on profitability, not an
 obligation to maintain neutrality (a core element of most WMF
 projects).  These services can cater to the revenue-driving majorities
 (with geographic segregation, if need be) and ignore minorities whose
 beliefs fall outside the mainstream for a given country.  We mustn't
 do that.


 Today to be successful organizations; both for-profit and not-for-profit,
 must recognize the needs of their global audience.  Offering image filters
 where people can set their own preferences and bypass the setting for
 individual settings is brilliant way for people with different values to
 share the same space. No content is removed, and people can see all images
 if they choose to.

 This approach is far better than the approach used by most other large
 educational institutions which currently control the viewing of
 controversial content through their acquisition process.

Wikipedia *is* successful, and an image filter was not part of its success.

I dont mind Wikimedia content being better labelled with metadata,
however the actual process of filtering should be done by the
user-agent.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 7:26 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
 On 7 September 2011 17:18, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

  On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 12:55 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
  On 7 September 2011 10:48, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:
 
  snip
 
 
 
 
  The closest we could come to a neutral filtering system is an easily
  accessible on/off switch for images.
 
 
  Interestingly, this proposal has come up many times completely separate
 to
  the issue of image filtering.  Many users, particularly those on dial-up
  systems or those whose billing is related to the amount of data accessed
  have asked for this ability for some time. For them it is a
 performance/cost
  issue, and has nothing to do with filtering. Given some of the arguments
  that have been made in opposition to filtering, particularly those that
 seem
  to focus on the content should be displayed in the way the authors
  intended, I'm concerned there would be equally significant opposition to
  even this simple matter.

 Turning off images should be, and can be, done by the user-agent.
 We have a help page describing how to do this.


 That would be the page with the great big this page is out of date notice
 at the top, giving instructions that are not valid for the most common user
 agents (Firefox 2?).

Every version of Mozilla has included the Dont load images option.
And it is simple to find.

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced


 It is very hard to cater for someone when you are not engaged with
 them in conversation. Any attempts to do so are doomed to make an ASS
 of U and ME (ASSUME).


It is hard, sure; most users/consumers don't engage - which is why a whole
industry has grown around finding out what they want and meeting that need.

But just because it is hard is not an excuse to not bother :)

Unless you are suggesting that our current use as a knowledge-base is
incidental to the point of Wikipedia (which seems a little out of track with
out goals...).


 Don't ASSUME. ASK!

 We have an existing mechanism by which people can engage and ASK, but
 many choose not to use it. Per definition, they are forfeiting their
 rights, unfortunately, (if they even exist).


You have to solicit those views, hunt them down and beat out of them what
their gripes and bug bears are. They will not come to you.

This is the basics of creating  a good product.

You have the process the wrong way round - leaving the consumer to be the
one doing the asking. But they are a mundane person flicking through reading
articles, some might have ideas on how to improve thins. But you won't find
them telling us without prompting.

This is why big companies will invest millions of dollars finding out what
it is their consumers want.

We are the ones who have to ASK

Incidentally, many attempts to help readers end up actually
 disenfranchising them. (and also disenfranchise anyone who might have
 been in a position to help them). Why? Because it puts a wedge
 between producers and consumers, even while we're attempting to
 create a prosumer class.


Usually because the producers think they know what consumers want. Which
never really works.

By contrast your approach/attitude creates the exact dichotomy you claim to
oppose.

Tom

(BTW your comments are coming across as acerbic/ironic and at times a quite
patronising - that is perhaps hampering people's ability to respond
constructively)
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On 7 September 2011 22:26, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:

 Turning off images should be, and can be, done by the user-agent.
 We have a help page describing how to do this.

 That would be the page with the great big this page is out of date notice
 at the top, giving instructions that are not valid for the most common user
 agents (Firefox 2?). And it spends a great deal of time talking about
 altering people's personal userspace.  Like David saida nice simple
 switch to turn them on and off without having to log in: that's what people
 have asked for. Mucking about with their user agent is beyond the technical
 comfort level of most internet users, and in some cases is not possible.
 (Example - many publicly accessible computers are set up so that no programs
 can be added or modified without sysadmin permissions.)


+1

This is really low-bandwidth usability. I've tried editing Wikipedia
on dialup ... it's annoying enough waiting for all the Javascript
these days on 1Mbit.

Images on Images off in a sidebar, switching the CSS live?


- d.

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread MZMcBride

Thomas Morton wrote:
 This is largely an engineering problem; and it can probably be overcome with
 some architecture work. As we are going to be implementing a major new
 feature *anyway* it's not something to reject outright, I think :)
 
 Obviously given the complexity of the category tree system any such
 engineering wouldn't be infallible - but you could match it to most use
 cases. Ultimately it is just a collapsing tree problem, and they are ten a
 penny to a decent engineer :)

I think some of your comments are exhibiting an unfamiliarity with the
tangled mess that is MediaWiki/Wikipedia. Have you done much work on
MediaWiki or worked with the replicated databases at all (particularly the
databases of the larger sites)? An outside voice is great, but yours comes
off as rather naïve.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On 7 Sep 2011, at 23:04, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote:

 Thomas Morton wrote:
 This is largely an engineering problem; and it can probably be overcome with
 some architecture work. As we are going to be implementing a major new
 feature *anyway* it's not something to reject outright, I think :)

 Obviously given the complexity of the category tree system any such
 engineering wouldn't be infallible - but you could match it to most use
 cases. Ultimately it is just a collapsing tree problem, and they are ten a
 penny to a decent engineer :)

 I think some of your comments are exhibiting an unfamiliarity with the
 tangled mess that is MediaWiki/Wikipedia. Have you done much work on
 MediaWiki or worked with the replicated databases at all (particularly the
 databases of the larger sites)? An outside voice is great, but yours comes
 off as rather naïve.

 MZMcBride

I've not proposed any actual solutions, or changes etc. Simply said
that the problem raised is an engineering problem and so needs to be
considered from that perspective.

From my off hand knowledge of MW it won't be particularly easy - but
as one of my professors used to say nothing is easy, but someone will
be able to fix it

The next step is to figure out what engineering would be needed to
provide these features and whether that is possible

Had anyone seriously assessed this? (and if the answer is yes, then fine)

Tom

(I tend to hold a positive attitude to such problems until they are
solved or shown insoluble; everyone tells me my proposed solutions at
work are impossible but they work out more often than not!)

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 10:45:29PM +0100, Thomas Morton wrote:
 
  It is very hard to cater for someone when you are not engaged with
  them in conversation. Any attempts to do so are doomed to make an ASS
  of U and ME (ASSUME).
 
 
 It is hard, sure; most users/consumers don't engage - which is why a whole
 industry has grown around finding out what they want and meeting that need.

Yes, but we're not that industry. In fact, (rightly-or-wrongly) we
characterize that industry as an Enemy.

 You have to solicit those views, hunt them down and beat out of them what
 their gripes and bug bears are. They will not come to you.

To an extent, but this assumes people are stupid and don't want to
help. Usually they do, if they know they can and are welcome. 

This has happened in the past, and still does happen to an extent
today. (Although many articles in news and blogs show that the
community on -en and -nl among others are becoming more and more
insular, sadly. The foundation is working to alleviate this).

 This is the basics of creating  a good product.

We're not creating a product.

 You have the process the wrong way round - leaving the consumer to be the
 one doing the asking. But they are a mundane person flicking through reading
 articles, some might have ideas on how to improve thins. But you won't find
 them telling us without prompting.

Right, if they don't care enough, they won't. If we make the barriers to
entry higher than their ability to care, they won't either.

 This is why big companies will invest millions of dollars finding out what
 it is their consumers want.

Or, in fact, billions. We have already outperformed those companies.
There are no tail-lights. But -being in the lead- we risk losing a goal
to chase after.

 We are the ones who have to ASK
Obviously. Because there's no us and them. Just an us. And all of
us need to ASK.  :-)

 Usually because the producers think they know what consumers want. Which
 never really works.

That's why I oppose producers.

 By contrast your approach/attitude creates the exact dichotomy you claim to
 oppose.

I think that our original approach has had a proven track record. It's
only after people abandoned it and/or got sloppy that things went
downhill, after all.

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

 (BTW your comments are coming across as acerbic/ironic and at times a quite
 patronising - that is perhaps hampering people's ability to respond
 constructively)

(Ahhh, your comments irritate me a bit too. I guess we're reflecting
that back and forth at each other and making it worse. Sorry about that. Let's
try hard to both be more polite to each other! Was this mail better
already?)


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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread Fajro

I think that having this kind of Image Filter is against the mission
of the Wikimedia Foundation and a claudication of the WMF in favor of
interests of others.

Letting some users to block Wikipedia content is NOT a good way to
disseminate it effectively and globally.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement

Allowing this type of self censorship is imposing a point of view.

It's a waste of time and resources to support the POV that certain
content should be censored.
Is opening the door to censorship and to give ammunition to enemies of
knowledge and freedom.

The users of Wikimedia projects should see The Sum of Human
Knowledge and not just the knowledge that I like.


-- 
Fajro

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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

2011-09-07 Thread Marc A. Pelletier

On 07/09/2011 11:17 AM, Bod Notbod wrote:
 [...] but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
 children they can't use Wikipedia [...]


It's not the first time I see this meme expressed.

Is there a reliable source somewhere that shows that (a) this represents 
a significant number of parents over several cultural groups, and that 
(b) there is serious indication that if (a) is true those same parents 
are going to change their stance given the proposed implementation of 
the image filter?

Because, unless we got some serious statistical backing for those 
assertions, they are just smoke blowing our of asses to the sound of 
but think of the children!

-- Coren / Marc


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[Foundation-l] Very sad news

2011-09-07 Thread emijrp

Michael S. Hart has died http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Michael_S._Hart
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Re: [Foundation-l] Personal Image Filter results announced

On Mon, Sep 05, 2011 at 06:25:05AM -0700, phoebe ayers wrote:
 The difference lies in our role as active editors (vs the librarian
 role as curators), making active choices; a reference work is a
 different kind of project from a library. It also lies in a difference
 in intent -- what the ALA speaks out about is labeling that is
 intended to restrict access. None of our labeling intends to restrict
 access to anything for anyone.


I guess this is where we get to the point where I disagree with
you Phoebe :)

We both agree that restricting access is evil. 

I think you believe there is a way in which we can make a labelling
scheme for filtering that is not intended to restrict access.

I believe that filtering is -per definition- a form of restricting
access. The proposed filter itself is fairly benign.However, the same
labels that are used on wikipedia to help good people to restrict
themselves being exposed to bad pictures, can equally be used by bad
people to restrict access to good pictures.

I have the impression you believe in the good in people. :)
I do too. Rotten apples are very rare!

In this case though, I think it only takes just one rotten apple to ruin
everyone's day. So we need to plan to ensure that there is
no way the rare rotten apple can subvert our work.

I know you believe that this is possible. We have a smart
community, surely someone can come up with a working solution.

I'm not so sure. My experience is that filters and their databases
tend to have all kinds of unintended side effects and collateral
damage. I've never seen it go right. Wikipedia would be the first
time that it ever did. I'm not saying it's entirely impossible.
Just that apparently it is very hard. And if we accidentally miss
something, it's going to ruin our day, our month or even our
year.

If we succeed, we anger our friends, and our enemies will
only clamor slightly less loudly. I'm not sure we will reach many
new people. I have seen some reports, but none answered that particular
question afaik. (Have I missed anything?)

If we happen to fail in the wrong way, one worst case scenario is
that our mission becomes doomed.  (If I were evil, I'd know exactly
how to make that happen)

So it's a high risk, low reward kind of play, in my personal
assesment. The board has said that they want this. I think they
surely must have a different risk assesment. :-)

So that explains some of my practical reasons for being somewhat
skeptical -not of the filter- but of the category system behind it.

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

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[Foundation-l] PG rating

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote:
 On 07/09/2011 11:17 AM, Bod Notbod wrote:
 [...] but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
 children they can't use Wikipedia [...]


 It's not the first time I see this meme expressed.

 Is there a reliable source somewhere that shows that (a) this represents
 a significant number of parents over several cultural groups, and that
 (b) there is serious indication that if (a) is true those same parents
 are going to change their stance given the proposed implementation of
 the image filter?

 Because, unless we got some serious statistical backing for those
 assertions, they are just smoke blowing our of asses to the sound of
 but think of the children!

Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG?

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

2011-09-07 Thread Marc A. Pelletier

On 07/09/2011 9:14 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
 Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG? 

Perhaps, the problem being that one parent's PG is another's inoffensive 
learning material.  I can readily see people who wouldn't want their 
children anywhere near [[Big Bang]], or [[Evolution]].  Those are 
probably the mostly the same people who would fear them stumbling on 
[[Penis]] without an image filter.Parents who want to substitute 
pretending the world doesn't exist for doing actual, you know, *parental 
guidance* are doing their children a disservice.

Reality is PG.

-- Coren / Marc


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

John Vandenberg wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org
 wrote: 
 On 07/09/2011 11:17 AM, Bod Notbod wrote:
 [...] but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
 children they can't use Wikipedia [...]
 
 
 It's not the first time I see this meme expressed.
 
 Is there a reliable source somewhere that shows that (a) this
 represents a significant number of parents over several cultural
 groups, and that (b) there is serious indication that if (a) is true
 those same parents are going to change their stance given the
 proposed implementation of the image filter?
 
 Because, unless we got some serious statistical backing for those
 assertions, they are just smoke blowing our of asses to the sound of
 but think of the children!
 
 Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as
 PG? 

[[WP:ANI]] is hardly an example to our children, is it?


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org wrote:
..
 Reality is PG.

;-)

By rating, I mean external standardised classification systems.
What individual parents do with those ratings is a different matter.

Does English Wikipedia have content which an external regulator would
classify as PG, or M?

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Phil Nash phn...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
...
 [[WP:ANI]] is hardly an example to our children, is it?

ANI isn't a content page.

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org
 wrote:
 On 07/09/2011 11:17 AM, Bod Notbod wrote:
 [...] but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
 children they can't use Wikipedia [...]


 It's not the first time I see this meme expressed.

 Is there a reliable source somewhere that shows that (a) this
 represents
 a significant number of parents over several cultural groups, and that
 (b) there is serious indication that if (a) is true those same parents
 are going to change their stance given the proposed implementation of
 the image filter?

 Because, unless we got some serious statistical backing for those
 assertions, they are just smoke blowing our of asses to the sound of
 but think of the children!

 Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG?

 --
 John Vandenberg

We serve a global and universal audience. Of course there are articles
that many parents would not want their children viewing. There is not
much we can do about that. What we can do is ensure that they do not
contain gratuitous, unneeded, offensive material.

I remember once at the local college library, Adams State, in Alamosa,
that they had Girl on a Swing in the children's collection.

The plot, to spoil it, is that a young woman, in order to marry someone
who doesn't want children, kills her child. Pretty much a modern Grimm's
Fairy Tale. Yet, I'm not sure it didn't belong in the young adult's
section of a childrens collection.

Children have a right to know about the world they live in, to know about
child abuse, pedophiles, anal sex, and mass murder by leaders millions of
people worship.

Fred



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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:26 AM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org
 wrote:
..
 Reality is PG.

 ;-)

 By rating, I mean external standardised classification systems.
 What individual parents do with those ratings is a different matter.

 Does English Wikipedia have content which an external regulator would
 classify as PG, or M?

 --
 John Vandenberg

You beg the question. Of course it does. Who wants their 12 year old girl
reading about anal sex? But where is the parent when a boy suggests anal
sex so she can continue to be a virgin?

Fred



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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

2011-09-07 Thread Risker

On 7 September 2011 21:14, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Marc A. Pelletier m...@uberbox.org
 wrote:
  On 07/09/2011 11:17 AM, Bod Notbod wrote:
  [...] but I'm even less keen on parents telling their
  children they can't use Wikipedia [...]
 
 
  It's not the first time I see this meme expressed.
 
  Is there a reliable source somewhere that shows that (a) this represents
  a significant number of parents over several cultural groups, and that
  (b) there is serious indication that if (a) is true those same parents
  are going to change their stance given the proposed implementation of
  the image filter?
 
  Because, unless we got some serious statistical backing for those
  assertions, they are just smoke blowing our of asses to the sound of
  but think of the children!

 Are there are pages on English Wikipedia that should be classified as PG?

 -


Many countries have different rating schemes for movies, television, video
games, and other media.  There are literally tens of thousands of pages on
the English Wikipedia that would fall afoul of rating schemes of multiple
countries, although they would vary significantly from country to country.

I recall some time ago, I bumped into an article that  had a video of the
bodies of dead (facially recognizable) soldiers being looted.  I'm pretty
sure that one would have crossed the PG (or equivalent) in many countries.
Sexually explicit pages cross the threshold in many countries as well,
obviously, and there are some that would be rated as Adults only in many
countries too.

But we already know that, so I wonder why you ask this?

Risker/Anne
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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

John Vandenberg wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Phil Nash phn...@blueyonder.co.uk
 wrote:
 ...
 [[WP:ANI]] is hardly an example to our children, is it?

 ANI isn't a content page.

As I understand it, all of Wikipedia is available to all readers. It follows 
that the same standard should prevail throughout, however good, or poor. And 
that's without exposing the lamentable ArbCom pages to the children of the 
world. We can, and should, be giving a better example to our future 
committed contributors. So it's no wonder new editors are being deterred, 
when existing editors are being treated with such disdain.  Unless and until 
we can follow Jimbo's proclaimed model of tolerance and forgiveness, silence 
is the best model to follow.


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
 Many countries have different rating schemes for movies, television, video
 games, and other media.

Which rating systems would apply to our content?

i.e. does the Australian regulatory body have jurisdiction over Wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Classification_Board

Yes it does, if the Australian Communications and Media Authority
refers the websites to it.

repeat and rinse for each country.

 There are literally tens of thousands of pages on
 the English Wikipedia that would fall afoul of rating schemes of multiple
 countries, although they would vary significantly from country to country.
 ..
 But we already know that, so I wonder why you ask this?

Sure there are a lot of possible problems, but I am wondering if we
have any concrete examples for us to consider.  It may inform debate
to talk about real content pages on a Wikipedia project which should
be rated, either by law or on a voluntary/best practice basis.

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
 Many countries have different rating schemes for movies, television,
 video
 games, and other media.

 Which rating systems would apply to our content?

 i.e. does the Australian regulatory body have jurisdiction over
 Wikipedia?

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Classification_Board

 Yes it does, if the Australian Communications and Media Authority
 refers the websites to it.

 repeat and rinse for each country.

Uh uh, there is no governor general of the United States with dictatorial
power. We have an enforceable constitution in which guarantees freedom of
speech.

Fred


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

John Vandenberg wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
 Many countries have different rating schemes for movies, television,
 video games, and other media.

 Which rating systems would apply to our content?

 i.e. does the Australian regulatory body have jurisdiction over
 Wikipedia?

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Classification_Board

 Yes it does, if the Australian Communications and Media Authority
 refers the websites to it.

 repeat and rinse for each country.

Rubbish, and the article you cite is very poorly-written anyway. Australia 
is not China and does not, and cannot, restrict access to websites that are 
global in nature. And if it even tried to do so, I've met a few Aussies in 
my time who understand the Internet and would easily subvert any regulation 
whatsoever. Not many, it has to be said, but enough to make such a move 
useless.

 There are literally tens of thousands of pages on
 the English Wikipedia that would fall afoul of rating schemes of
 multiple countries, although they would vary significantly from
 country to country. ..
 But we already know that, so I wonder why you ask this?

 Sure there are a lot of possible problems, but I am wondering if we
 have any concrete examples for us to consider.  It may inform debate
 to talk about real content pages on a Wikipedia project which should
 be rated, either by law or on a voluntary/best practice basis.

Such debate would be useless. one man's meat, etc, and I don't see how 
Wikipedia could possibly subscribe to a lowest-common denominator type of 
policy, unless it wants to become an encyclopedia fit only for children, and 
beyond that, an encyclopedia fit only for what parents, or worse, 
politicians, think appropriate. I didn't fight in two World Wars- I admit 
that- but my parents and grandparents did- that we could have free access to 
information, which means all information. And any attempt at grading, 
rating, or whatever, is bound to be a breach of so many WP policies that if 
you don't know what they are, you shouldn't be an Arbitrator, an 
Administrator, or even an editor.

Kill this idea now.



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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

Fred Bauder wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
 Many countries have different rating schemes for movies, television,
 video
 games, and other media.

 Which rating systems would apply to our content?

 i.e. does the Australian regulatory body have jurisdiction over
 Wikipedia?

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Classification_Board

 Yes it does, if the Australian Communications and Media Authority
 refers the websites to it.

 repeat and rinse for each country.

 Uh uh, there is no governor general of the United States with
 dictatorial power. We have an enforceable constitution in which
 guarantees freedom of speech.

 Fred

Up to a point. There are so many exceptions to that principle that it's 
somewhat pointless to mention it in the context of a private website.


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 12:33 PM, Phil Nash phn...@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
John Vandenberg wrote:
..
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Classification_Board

 Rubbish, and the article you cite is very poorly-written anyway.

I provided the link to Wikipedia so people unfamiliar with Australia
have somewhere to start.

 Australia is not China and does not, and cannot, restrict access to
 websites that are global in nature.

http://www.efa.org.au/category/censorship/mandatory-isp-filtering/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/15/australian_censorship_measures/

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 12:15:00PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote:
 On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Risker risker...@gmail.com wrote:
  Many countries have different rating schemes for movies, television, video
  games, and other media.
 
 Sure there are a lot of possible problems, but I am wondering if we
 have any concrete examples for us to consider.  It may inform debate
 to talk about real content pages on a Wikipedia project which should
 be rated, either by law or on a voluntary/best practice basis.

Pages on wikipedia should not be rated. Ratings are per definition
a prejudicial labelling scheme, they are given as an example of such
a scheme by ALA. ALA classifies such rating schemes as Censorship tools.

The canadian and international library associations have similar
definitions.

Censorship and the tools thereto are evil. Our objective is to
promote information that is free as in freedom of speech. Wikipedia
is a constructive and friendly way to achieve this goal. 

I would prefer to attain my goals in constructive and friendly ways
(obviously). I would prefer not to work in unfriendly ways, or
outright destructive ways.

If you want to promote a rating scheme, please do so elsewhere.

sincerely,
Kim Bruning

-- 
[Non-pgp mail clients may show pgp-signature as attachment]
gpg (www.gnupg.org) Fingerprint for key  FEF9DD72
5ED6 E215 73EE AD84 E03A  01C5 94AC 7B0E FEF9 DD72

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 01:00:27PM +1000, John Vandenberg wrote:
 http://www.efa.org.au/category/censorship/mandatory-isp-filtering/
 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/15/australian_censorship_measures/

I know, right? That's why it's politically so damned inconvenient
for the board to move for a filter now. It plays right into the
hands of these thoroughly nasty people.

sincerely,
Kim Bruning


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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating

Hi Kim,

I think you might be more interested in looking at the same question
from another perspective.

Are there any encyclopedia which have been
classified/banned/bowlderised by any country in the last 50 years?

If Wikipedia is a quality encyclopedia, most rating agencies would
decide that the content is appropriate for all ages.

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Foundation-l] PG rating