[Foundation-l] Wikipedia is not censored (was Wikipedia is not the Karma Sutra, was Re: commons and freely licensed sexual imagery

Sun May 17 22:25:42 UTC 2009

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> There is certainly a way to design such a feature to address the concerns you list.  I believe the real  problem with such a feature is in content selection. There are always the boderline cases and who puts in the work to sort it out, someone will unhappy with the decisions (in both directions) and complaining about the management of it all.  And also the time delay factor, as things are being contstantly changed.  If we advertise that we have such a feature and people sign-up for it and it is only 80% effective, we may suffer more loss of goodwill then if we don't offer a "safe" option at all. Passively not meeting people's expectations is much better outcome than actively setting their expectaions to a certaiin level and then failing to meet them.

What I'd like to see is a preferences framework that allows people to
subscribe to a set of opt-in viewing/reading options similar to how we
currently can add JS widgets.  If any of them become so massively
popular and useful that there is demand to include them as a
single-button option in the global user prefs menu, that's ok - but we
can wait to see how each viewing option is received.

The ones I imagine getting lots of use would not be about
'content-hiding', but would filter up/down other sorts of information
(I really want an option to see major contributors, or the last few
contributors, near the top of an article for instance).   However,
this would also let the minority of readers who care a lot about that
collaborate with one another on making reading WP more friendly for
them.

SJ