Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:That's the way the cookie crumbles (Score 5, Informative) 455

Thank you, that's interesting and, at least in theory potentially useful to me some day.

(Only had one real copyright claim, someone used one of my images on the cover of their death metal CD and was selling it. No returned phone calls for weeks. Good thing it was the cover, Eventually I DMCA'd the album cover from Amazon's web site, got a call back in *minutes*, whole matter was settled an hour or two later. If they'd counterclaimed, or just used m images inside the CD booklet, ... well, anyway. Weird how these things work.

Anyway, thanks again for the data.

One other thing: The copyright office has an RfC or the like on making a copyright small claims court. I think something like that might be sensible, but IANAL. Anyway, FYI, http://www.copyright.gov/docs/smallclaims/

Comment Re:Not a problem (Score 1) 544

Since you're clearly experienced with Wikipedia, I'll put it in Wikiparlance.

You can't define "mature content" without a POV.

That's the fundamental problem. Now, as it turns out, I happen to believe in a few cases (particularly with respect to the popular American idea that the EXISTENCE of gay people is a mature topic), it's a particularly egregious concern with respect to NPOV. But the fundamental problem is simply that it's POV.

Comment Re:Not a problem (Score 1) 544

I don't really know enough about Sanger's history to comment intelligently, I speculated, but tried to mark it as that, and tried to allow that it's pretty easy to have strong feelings about really gross sexual content. And I do understand some desire to keep inappropriate material from children.

The NPOV thing : The simplest example I can provide will be US-centric editors marking any form of non-sexual intimacy between two people of the same sex as content inappropriate for children. While that may not go as far as handholding, we will see (as we've seen in any filtering software ever deployed, particularly crowd-sourced ones) unequal application of what does and doesn't constitute "adult content".

A filter marking some images as "adult" and some not is a Wikipedia imposition of a point of view on a contentious subject--and it's not just "penises are adult", it will be, if every bit of past experience is an guide whatsoever, a situation where "male-male kisses are adult, female-female kisses are sometimes okay, male-female kisses aren't". You'll probably be able to see differences in the applications of these rules based on race or combinations of race too, there's a surprising percentage of people in the US who would ban interracial marriage--look it up.

I'd be less bothered by filters that said "has a penis", "has a boob", etc. But "adult content", "inappropriate for children", that's a fussy, subjective, and even in this thread highly-contested bar.

Comment Re:porn? where? (Score 1) 544

Take a deep breath, and point at a specific file, since you pointed at several. And also--this is a question of what shows up in the encyclopedia. You're going around to the back of the image hosting, but not every image in that image host is actually used in an encyclopedia article. Go ahead and tell me where one of those images is used in the encyclopedia, and then perhaps we can begin to have a discussion.

Comment Re:Not a problem (Score 2) 544

I think that is sort of the point: There are some people within the Wikimedia/Wikipedia community who simply don't even want the bit to be added to the MediaWiki software database structure in the first place, particularly as it applies to adult content. It doesn't matter that this is turned off by default or that it is even optional to put on a page or image and can be removed with a simple edit by an ordinary editor.... there are people in the community who simply don't even want the feature at all ...

With the exception of the "will go to any length", stuff that I've snipped out here, I'm pretty much one of them.

And the reason is simple. Image and web filtering outside of Wikipedia has always turned out to be a coatrack not just for "not showing sexual acts" but for the insertion of political, sexist, racist, or heterosexist bias. Moreover, not every parent shares the same definition of what it's inappropriate to see, you and I might not call "holding hands" porn, but the laws of North Carolina essentially treat it as sexual incitement, and the people behind those laws are going to want that called "adult content." Obviously the Wikipedia community will average a bit more liberal than that, but (a) there's no objective place to draw a line for an adult content image filter, and (b) those discussions are still going to eat a lot of cycles, and will inevitably erode WP:NPOV, Wikipedia's neutral point of view policy.

And, .. where's the real problem? I've spent quite a bit of time on Wikipedia, and sure there's stuff there I don't want to look at. But surprisingly little, and the vast majority of what is actually problematic doesn't stick around inappropriately in articles. Yet Wikipedia still gets a fair bit of whining where you might think there'd be none--the number of folks deeply offended that one of the pictures at kissing involves two men, or did a few years ago, is telling enough. The last thing the encyclopedia needs is an excuse for more of that bullshit.

So, what's really behind this effort?

Hard to say with Sanger, and he does have fair "concerns", but he's got a history with Wikipedia that raises questions about the motivation for this article. For the board, I'd guess there's a desire to some extent for political (or even legal) cover, a natural inclination, I've worked on a non-profit board. It happens.

But many of those of us who actually want to build an encyclopedia with a neutral point of view are against it.

I'm surprised that anyone thinks this is a surprise.

Slashdot Top Deals

1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.

Working...