Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem? (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute  (it's just a big porn site!)

(2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries

(3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even risk bumping into the law (underage models)

"The lay of the land" Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very broadly.   In particular the commons community expects the public to also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers the educational mission. There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons: Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective communication with these customers.  Some Wikimedia projects rely on commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community.  This relationship works because of trust which the commons community has built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues when hasty acts do cause issues. Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on matters of taste.  Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more reliable as an image source for customer projects. I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the policy somehow. There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values.  If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community. Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time, but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists everywhere in our projects. There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art, basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored. ... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the languages the discussions are held in. "The goal" Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems? Lets take a category of Penis images as an example.  Load it up. Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this, right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive mission of commons in educating through media). Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP article in some language. An example of every disease with penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already. People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will differ. So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to hundreds of pictures of penises.   Now— commons' hundreds are not so diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational remit we still need a bunch. Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements?   Well, With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast commons as a penis palace.  Thus, in terms of this class of images— problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god; it's full of cocks" response, they can... Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ categorical blocking software.  They block broad categories like "Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories. Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering services are often criticized for blocking information on breast exams, for example.   Because of the way the blocking happens reducing the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way.   So problem (2) seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission. I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces (which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately). Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without privacy problems.  But accepting these images heightens the perception that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting educational resources. The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected.  As a checkuser (with OTRS access)  I can't say that I've seen evidence of abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them. Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily deleted without dispute.  I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other people may get different results. Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things? We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers.  I'm at a loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really hard. Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention:  Commons has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated completely without regard to the community process was described as an "almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about 0.008% of the collection. At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work on. None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance. Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one satisfactorily. The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion.  I expect the same is true for many other contributors. ... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish ex-nupedian,  I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are suddenly in need of a major effort.   I can promise you that a far greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden malware, etc. Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some excusability for disruption to our customer projects. But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal governance.  We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of the deletions.  There is no active discussion about making an improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship.  Many other messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail. I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will foster improved communication on the subject. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

I thought it might be useful to here if I shared some of my experiences with commons. Like many people I've had the experience of bumping into a human sexuality related commons category or gallery and thinking "Holy crap! Thats a lot of [gallery name]. Freeking teenage pornofreaks!". But unlike many other people, I am in a position to do something about it: I'm a commons administrator and checkuser reasonably well respected in the commons community (when I'm not inactive, at least), well connected to the commons star-chamber, and I've played a role in many of the internal 'governance by fiat' events. I think it's likely that a majority of my deletions have been technically "out of process", but by keeping a good working relationship with the rest of the commons community this hasn't been a problem at all. To take action you have to understand a few things: "The problem", "The lay of the land", and "The goal". Why might a super-abundance of explicit images be a problem? (1) They potentially bring the Wikimedia sites into ill repute (it's just a big porn site!) (2) They encourage the blocking of Wikimedia sites from schools and libraries (3) Explicit photographs are a hot-bed of privacy issues and can even risk bumping into the law (underage models) I'm sure others can be listed but these are sufficient for now. "The lay of the land" Commons has a hard rule that for images to be in scope they must potentially serve an educational purpose. The rule is followed pretty strictly, but the definition of educational purpose is taken very broadly. In particular the commons community expects the public to also use commons as a form of "visual education", so having a great big bucket of distinct pictures of the same subject generally furthers the educational mission. There are two major factors complicating every policy decision on commons: Commons is also a service project. When commons policy changes over 700 wikis feel the results. Often, language barriers inhibit effective communication with these customers. Some Wikimedia projects rely on commons exclusively for their images, so a prohibition on commons means (for example) a prohibition on Es wiki, even though most Eswikipedians are not active in the commons community. This relationship works because of trust which the commons community has built over the years. Part of that trust is that commons avoids making major changes with great haste and works with projects to fix issues when hasty acts do cause issues. Commons itself is highly multi-cultural. While commons does have a strong organizing principle (which is part of why it has been a fantastic success on its own terms where all other non-wikipedia WMF projects are at best weakly successful), that principle is strongly inclusive and mostly directs us to collect and curate while only excluding on legal grounds and a few common areas of basic human decency— it's harder to create any kind of cross cultural agreement on matters of taste. Avoiding issues of taste also makes us more reliable as an image source for customer projects. I think that a near majority of commons users think that we could do with some reductions in the quantity of redundant / low quality human sexuality content, due to having the same experience I started this message with. Of that group I think there is roughly an even split between people who believe the existing "educational purposes" policy is sufficient and people who think we could probably strengthen the policy somehow. There are also people who are honestly offended that some people are offended by human sexuality content— and some of them view efforts to curtail this content to be a threat to their own cultural values. If this isn't your culture, please take a moment to ponder it. If your personal culture believes in the open expression of sexuality an effort to remove "redundant / low quality" sexuality images while we not removing low quality pictures of clay pots, for example, is effectively an attack on your beliefs. These people would tell you: If you don't like it, don't look. _Understanding_ differences in opinion is part of the commons way, so even if you do not embrace this view you should at least stop to understand that it is not without merit. In any case, while sometimes vocal, people from this end of the spectrum don't appear to be all that much of the community. Of course, there are a few trolls here and there from time to time, but I don't think anyone really pays them much attention. There are lots of horny twenty somethings, but while it might bias the discussions towards permissiveness I don't think that it really has a big effect beyond the basic youthful liberalism which exists everywhere in our projects. There are also a couple of occasional agitators calling for things like a complete removal of sexuality content. Most of them fail to sound reasonable at all— demanding the removal of old works of art, basic anatomy photos... I think these complaints are mostly ignored. ... and a majority of people who either don't care or don't speak the languages the discussions are held in. "The goal" Considering the landscape, how do we solve the problems? Lets take a category of Penis images as an example. Load it up. Hundreds of penii. Pretty shocking. We can obviously cut back on this, right? How many penis images do we really need to meet the mission of the Wikipedias? (and then we need to consider the more expansive mission of commons in educating through media). Well, we ought to have circumcised, and uncircumcised. Flaccid and erect. An example of each kind of penis jewellery that has a WP article in some language. An example of every disease with penis-visible symptoms.... We're easily at 50-100 images already. People seem to think we also need many of the prior samples from multiple races to demonstrate the (lack of) differences. Add a little further inflation because editorial preferences on the Wikipedias will differ. So on the basis of meeting the Wikipedia's need alone, we're up to hundreds of pictures of penises. Now— commons' hundreds are not so diverse, we need fewer of some kinds and more of others, but in terms of the sheer count even before considering commons' own educational remit we still need a bunch. Where does this place us in terms of our problem statements? Well, With hundreds of pictures in the category it will be easy to cast commons as a penis palace. Thus, in terms of this class of images— problem (1) is probably unsolvable given our educational mission. If someone wants to point to the category and inspire the "Oh my god; it's full of cocks" response, they can... Virtually all libraries and schools that block internet sites employ categorical blocking software. They block broad categories like "Drugs, weapons, nudity, pornography, and proxy evasion". All of the Wikimedia projects could be blocked under all of these categories. Even a highly educational penis is still nudity— these filtering services are often criticized for blocking information on breast exams, for example. Because of the way the blocking happens reducing the number of penis images to the educational minimum would not likely reduce the incidence of blocking in any material way. So problem (2) seems to be unsolvable given our educational mission. I think we could make some improvement with problem (3). The privacy issues can also be addressed by using images without visible faces (which are often perceived to be more prurient, unfortunately). Ironically— the commercial pornography industry has been pretty happy to supply us with images which we are quite sure are legal and without privacy problems. But accepting these images heightens the perception that commons is promoting pornography rather than merely hosting educational resources. The prevalence of commercial sex images reflects the result of prior attempts to avoid child images and images created without the model's consent, though I don't think the consequence was expected. As a checkuser (with OTRS access) I can't say that I've seen evidence of abuse by commercial porn providers: Wikimedians are going to them. Although, _obviously_ problematic images are regularly and easily deleted without dispute. I've nuked a few from orbit and never hit the slightest bit of resistance. Though the community also has no reason to distrust my claims that an image is inappropriate, other people may get different results. Now how would we draft such a policy to further improve things? We need a policy which can be easily understood by many languages and cultures, which improves the situation but doesn't provide a basis for other censorship (e.g. some would have us remove all likenesses of Muhammad, images of women without veils, historical offensive political cartoons and symbols, etc). Actually be enforceable in the face of incomplete information from uploaders, without the risk of too much 'taste' and the resulting instability for customers. I'm at a loss. I have no suggestion beyond preferring illustrations rather than photos (which we already do), and accepting images contributions commercial sources, which is bad for our image. This seems really hard. Now pull in the part of the landscape that I didn't mention: Commons has almost five million images. The deletion spree which was operated completely without regard to the community process was described as an "almost complete cleanup" removed fewer than 500 images— or about 0.008% of the collection. At this point in my reasoning I inevitably conclude (1) The problem was far less bad than my initial impression. (2) At _best_ we can't solve much of the problem without accepting aggressive censorship of our coverage, both text and images (3) The part we could improve is pretty hard to improve. (4) There are more important things to work on. None of this really depends on any difficulty coming from governance. Even as supreme ruler for a day I couldn't solve this one satisfactorily. The initial surprise is enough that I've gone through this cycle several times now, but I keep reaching the same conclusion. I expect the same is true for many other contributors. ... and outside of some agitation from people pushing for the unachievable like "school safeness", and some popular troll-nest message boards, troll-nest 'news' agencies, and a somewhat trollish ex-nupedian, I haven't seen a lot of evidence that these 0.008% are suddenly in need of a major effort. I can promise you that a far greater proportion of our works are misleadingly labelled, outright spam, egregious copyright violations, potentially carrying hidden malware, etc. Feedback from the board that such an effort is desired from the board would certainly help shift the priorities— it would also give us some excusability for disruption to our customer projects. But this isn't what we got at all. The clear _consensus_ among the commons community and many of our customers is that what we what we got was disruptive, under-informed, and damaging to our internal governance. We now faction lines have been drawn between the couple of commons users aligned with Jimmy and the (literally) hundreds of users opposed the methodology used here and the specifics of some of the deletions. There is no active discussion about making an improvement, our customers are discussing creating chapter operated forks of commons free from this kind of disruptive intervention which is perceived by many to be overt values based censorship. Many other messages have expressed the complaints in greater detail. I hope this has provided some useful background and that it will foster improved communication on the subject. _______________________________________________ Commons-l mailing list Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l